Comments on: Redesigning the Labs website: we need you

By: Jason Thompson

Jason Thompson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:53:05 +0000

Add a text editor Like FCKeditor to the Comment boxes so easier to past links, pictures, text color to community Form pages…something yahoo needs to do why I am checking out Ubiquity… A company like yahoo making millions should have a lot better editor for mail…And this site to say

By: Vinay

Vinay — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:53:16 +0000

In our house we have 3 systems, While browsing in and would have opened many tabs and windows in the browser. Is there any option in the browser to save all the links that are presently opened and mail them or do something so that all of them can be opened by same user if he/she wants to browse in other system.

By: Linton

Linton — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:41:10 +0000

I personally don’t see a connection to anything anyone is talking about and the general idea of “labs” or “concepts.” What everyone is talking about in comments and the write up sounds like a great “projects” website. If you are going to do that, you might as well re-do the Mozilla add-ons website comment system or whatever.

I think the model should be closer to the patent office not Mozdev. Don’t get me wrong, I love Mozdev but at what point exactly does a project not belong in labs? Version 1.0? Version 0.5? I say if you have something even mildly past version .0001, it should not be here. Labs is a place for “ideas” right?

Lets say I have an idea that’s 10 or 20 years off. I don’t know, a browser that reads the images from my mind and does a reverse image search. That’s not going to version 1.0 anytime soon! What place would it have here in everyone’s idea of a new lab’s site? Related programs column: blank. People working on programming box. zip! Demo link. Nadda!

And stop slapping Facebook on everything. If there is no real reason for two projects to be “friends” then they shouldn’t be. Anyway, sorry if this came out like a rant, I just don’t like what I have seen. I have a terrible feeling the new site will be crap.

By: David Boswell

David Boswell — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:22:01 +0000

I think mozdev.org could help with some of the redesign requirements, specifically “Must scale up to 1000s of projects and 100000s of participations”. The site is currently hosting over 1000 projects with over 200 of them active.

http://www.mozdev.org/projects/active.html

The site has also been acting as a community incubator and many prominent features and applications started there, including Greasemonkey, Total Recall (session restore) and Camino. Some Labs projects are also already using some of mozdev’s infrastructure.

http://www.mozdev.org/drupal/wiki/MozdevIncubator

Using mozdev would also fit in with some other principles and goals, including “Use existing tools or software as much as possible – avoid extensive development” and “Must be easy to do site updates (web UI/wysiwyg, not SVN)”. Creating a wysiwyg editing interface is next on mozdev’s roadmap:

http://www.mozdev.org/resources/roadmap.html

We’d be very interested in talking with the Labs team more about how we might be able to work together to benefit both of our communities.

By: Aniruddh

Aniruddh — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:33:17 +0000

I think provide a Meebo Room for chat or IRC so all people can chat via any IM id and should start support of open Id so user can log in via any ID by this it will be more easy and simple. Now for coloration provide tool kind of Google Groups which include forums and provide a wiki tool which can be easy to use..Still I think most of wiki are not as easy as they should be..try wet paint. I like that wiki tool.And for video conferencing provide seesmic support its kind of a tool which is work with a web cam and easy to use. We don’t need live video conferencing but some thing we cant express by writing or by pictures in that case video support will be good.I’m not talking about you tube or other video sharing websites..may be you can export the seesmic videos to other video sharing website and after that you can post it to anywhere in website. Here you can use micro blogging service like twitter or yammer so for other user it will be easy to track new updates for project. and also provide RSS feeds so user can see the updates.

I think there r many tools on internet but we should use the tool which are not so complicated and not so techie for users..It should be simple and easy, Remember the main aim is to provide easy tools so user can execute and collaborate the projects very easy.

By: Jeremy Giberson

Jeremy Giberson — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 17:31:27 +0000

Obviously project tagging is a must. And while most sites implement a tag based search, few implement multiple tag search. In other words, as a project can have multiple tags that describe its use and function, a search should accept multiple tags in any order to find projects that contain all specified keywords.

Tag browsing: Some times you just want to see whats out there by genre. So being able to browse all projects by specifying tags that interest you. So a browsing feature that is filtered by (one or more) tags.

Another discovery feature-Random project link: Clicking this link takes you to a detailed (or home page on labs.mozilla) random project. This link should always be available and in the same location. It would be nice if you could apply a tag filter to the random link as well.

By: Fabien Benetou

Fabien Benetou — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:46:15 +0000

Im myself trying to build an “idea portfolio” so in the process I collected the list of “alternatives” (not to say competitors so you can have a look at it here http://wiki.seedea.org/Seedea/Alternatives

By: Brian King

Brian King — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:39:15 +0000

Deb, we at Mozdev would like to get involved to see how Mozdev can help out and more tightly integrate with features that you need. We already have a lot of infrastructure in place.

By: Coleman

Coleman — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:00:20 +0000

I’m with Lukas, only I think there should be more visual collaboration, like a publicly-edited wireframe.

By: Lukas Blakk

Lukas Blakk — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:52:10 +0000

Live-chatting capabilities, or even better – video conferencing for people to brainstorm together. When I was getting into videoblogging a few years back there was this regular video conference where people would chime in from all over and discuss where we were going, what was important, and it meant a lot to put faces to names.

I like the idea in the wiki about having profiles and projects you’re working on/proposing. Like Facebook style but for your ideas (and code?). A public sketch book where you can jot down your late night inspiration and maybe in the morning someone will have jumped on board with you or come up with some great feedback for you.

Having some kind of simple project management tools built in would be useful, cause ideas are all fine and good but tracking the actual progress on a project would certainly help with completion. Ways to assign people tasks and due dates, to graph the milestones of a project, to share files with others, to set up a front page for the project with your work as it’s released and updated.

Will think more on this. I love the concept of Mozilla Labs, can’t wait to see how it goes.