User:Bhashem/AddOns-AMO-Principles

This short document outlines the top few principles around Add-Ons, the Add-Ons ecology and addons.mozilla.org (AMO). They bolded items below represent the most important goals of what AMO needs to be.

I. Create the most comprehensive Firefox Add-ons directory on the web

• Create nodes for non-AMO hosted stuff
• AMO search results should include non-AMO hosted stuff
• Write a crawler that collects xpi's and metadata and populates AMO. (e.g. Mahalo just launched something. Stuff is in private beta, perhaps you add it to the sandbox or a non-AMO portion of the site)
• Create a manual index of individual locations (Google, Yahoo,Skype,selected user blogs, etc...)
• Allow publishing from mozdev and other extension project development sites
• Suck in from other AMO-like sites
• Comprehensiveness include language and locale breadth, get add-ons and AMO translated into multiple languages

II. Help various user types find and discover addons

• Improved addons manager in Firefox
• Create a theme browser to quickly discover themes
• Improve search so that results and keyword yield good results
• Developer an AddOns Recommendation Wizard that is task based
• Allow for searching by Firefox architecture (plugin, toolbar, sidebar, etc…) – perhaps by clicking on an image of the Firefox areas?
• Recommendation Lists
  • Enable publishing and sharing of recommendation lists from third-parties (RecoList Builder)
  • Create recommendations based on browser data (e.g. search or browse history - we see you visited facebook, do you want the Facebook addon?)
  • Create recommendations based on psychographics (e.g. love social networking ,photography, etc…)
  • Get personal - currently all recommendations are not based on what you have already
• % of users who use this extension also found Addon X to be useful
• “You might also like” recommendations
• Allow users to self-identify (e.g. new user, advanced user, web developer, extension author) to provide recommendations

III. Ensure the highest quality for what gets published

• Safe from a integrity of software, user experience, security, performance, privacy, etc..
• In cases where AMO can't vouch for an addon, provide additional details/info so user can make an informed decision (e.g. this is why it's sandboxed, it's non-AMO hosted, etc...)
• Ensure users get a "safe" experience
• Security signature of extensions/SSL site
• Create a reliability rating system
• Enforce security reviews for extensions to prevent malware attacks (esp. upon previously approved extensions) – Not just new stuff coming in, but all updates
• Share a talos/performance/memory impact assessment (increase in startup time, page load and/or mem usage)
• Create tiers of review (e.g. Random AddOn, Basic Review, Security Checked, Privacy Checked, Spyware Free, etc...)

IV. Create a satisfied ecosystem of extension developers, editors/reviewers, translators

• Consider all the steps from learning to author an extension to writing it to deploy to supporting - dev tools, docs, tracking & stats, etc...
• Provide better stats/analytics tools
  • Historical view graphs - # of users, growth rates, growth trends (bunch of time periods)
  • RSS feeds that be subscribed to
  • CSV that can be downloaded
  • Funnel visualization (a la Google Analytics) - download, first run, active users
• Build value proposition of why it's good to host on AMO
  • What you get for free? hosting, distributed worldwide, uptime, whitelist, a site with traffic, marketing?, real-time instrumentation, etc...
• For self-hosters, provide a set of tools for publishing success
  • Here's an <object> or iframe that features your stuff integrated into your site - no AMO branding, etc...
  • Here's a way to private label your stuff on the AMO site - e.g. upload you header/footer/etc... hosted on AMO
  • For transalators, possibly work with Babelzilla
    • Didn't want to discriminate against other translation sites
    • Offer a developer API, write access - can access localization for addons
    • Add addon metadata translation to xpi themselves. For example, look for specially named file (might be a bug on it)

V. Grow the site to include ALL types of customizations

• Include all types of customization that can be done with Firefox:
  • microformat detectors & handlers
  • RSS feed and content handlers
  • Plugins (harmonize with PFS)
  • Personas
  • Greasemonkey, CoScripter, webapp profiles
  • Joey/Mobile/iFirefox home page Widgets?
• Customization technotes that don't involve installing new software