personas

The Future of Personas

Martell — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:30:42 +0000

As you may already know, Personas in Firefox 3.6 has been a phenomenal success and with this new-found success comes new responsibility. Personas was a Mozilla Labs experiment that has matured and graduated from Labs. Much of its process and code was for a prototype and is beginning to suffer from the overwhelming popularity in Firefox 3.6. In order for Mozilla to give Personas the support it rightly deserves changes are in order.

Read more on the Add-ons Blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2010/03/03/the-future-of-personas/

The life of a Personas approver

Martell — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:50:55 +0000

We’ve recruited for persona approvers for the past few months and I realized (thanks to Mary) that we never explained what’s involved in being a personas approver!

The responsibilities of being an approver are pretty simple: you review personas! We have a list of all unreviewed personas that have not been approved:

Our approvers work their way through the list every day.

To review a persona, you click on the ‘Administer’ link and view the full-size images. If the persona meets the review guidelines, you click ‘Approve’. If not you click ‘Reject’ and enter a reason (image is excessively stretched, offensive language, etc). You can also flag the persona for legal review if it is difficult to tell if the persona meets the review guidelines.

Speaking of which, here is an abbreviated version of the review guidelines:

The only things we should be reviewing for are:

sexual, inappropriate, or offensive content;
violence, war or weaponry images, or Nazi images;
defamatory content;
references to online gambling;
general housekeeping that is readily apparent without further research.

You can spend as much or as little time as you want reviewing personas, it’s up to you (of course, we’d love for you to spend some time each day reviewing ). The only requirement we have for becoming an approver is that you’ve created at least one persona.

Interested in becoming an approver? Send an email to personas@mozilla.com with your username for getpersonas.com and we’ll get you setup!

57,000 and going strong!

Martell — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:48:24 +0000

That’s right, you heard correctly, there are now over 57,000 personas on getpersonas.com. The past three weeks have been a blur for the Personas team and its contributors. We’ve seen millions of new users join our community and enjoy theming their Firefox. Thousands of designers created over 19,000 personas!

Just to give you an idea of how many new personas have been submitted, here’s a graph of personas submitted per day:

Other fun stats:

5,000,000 pageviews on average per day
500,000 unique users a day on average
700 new personas created/day

The Personas community is going strong, if you want to help you can join our Google Group, answer questions on support.mozilla.com or become an approver by emailing personas@mozilla.com. We have some exciting ideas for the future of Personas, stay tuned for more details!

Help Personas Succeed!

Martell — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:16:55 +0000

Personas are now a feature of Firefox and we need your help! We want to have more of the community involved with Personas and here’s how:

Support users in our google group: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs-personas/
Answer support forum questions in SUMO: http://tinyurl.com/ybwdkjy (SUMO search for ‘personas’)
Update the wiki with information: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Personas
File bugs:
- Personas website: http://tinyurl.com/yj66yfh
- Personas add-on: http://tinyurl.com/yzmutzb
- Personas feature in Firefox 3.6: http://tinyurl.com/yhxo2ot

If you want to become an approver, send an email to personas@mozilla.com.

Personas update

Martell — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:21:47 +0000

It’s been a crazy few days for Personas since the release of Firefox 3.6. In case you didn’t already know, Personas are built-in to Firefox 3.6! Now millions more users of Firefox can enjoy personalizing their browser with Personas.

Since the Firefox firstrun page features Personas and links to the gallery, we’ve seen a substantial increase in traffic to the site. Here are some basic stats:

Since Jan 21st, we’ve had:

35 million pageviews
3 million unique visitors
250 thousand add-on downloads and
>3,000 new personas uploaded

All in all, it’s been a great ride so far. We’re excited that Personas are being exposed to a whole new audience and thousands more artists are creating personas.

But we do need your help; we need approvers! Our current team of persona approvers needs help keeping up with all the new personas being uploaded every day. If you’ve created a persona and are interested, please read the review guidelines and send us an email at personas@mozilla.com. You can help us make Personas for Firefox a success!

P.S: If you haven’t already, check out our awesome Personas video on the homepage.

getpersonas.com 2.1 has launched!

Martell — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:49:40 +0000

If getpersonas.com seems a little bit snappier today, there’s a reason. Last night we released a new version of the website that utilizes a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that makes browsing getpersonas.com even faster.

What’s a CDN, you ask? To put it simply, a CDN moves content that normally would be served from a website in one location and stores it all around the world, making it faster for you, the user to download it. We’re using a CDN to store images, JavaScript and CSS for getpersonas.com.

Another neat trick we are using to make the site faster is far future Expires headers. What this does is tell the browser to cache our files and not re-download them every time you visit our site, saving you bandwidth and time.

This release also contains numerous bugfixes, view the full buglist if you want to know more.

Special thanks to Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj, Jeremy Orem and Matthew Zeier for their hard work in making this release possible.

Introducing Personas 2.0

Myk Melez — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:34:17 +0000

Personas 2.0 offers a cleaner look, clearer navigation, and easier ways to discover and engage new art. Check out the new site here.

The Mozilla Labs team launched Personas 1.0 in March with the idea that it shouldn’t be hard to make your internet browser more fun and personal. Over the past eight months, with your feedback and support, we iterated on the Personas experience fifteen times (10 times on the website, 5 times on the extension) and are now pleased to introduce Personas 2.0.

Here is a screencast by Ryan Doherty, who led development work on the redesign:

Introducing Personas 2.0 from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo.

What’s New?

1. Enhanced look: Thanks to the creative vision and guidance of Chris Howse, the site now has a cleaner look and feel, and also customizes an experience based on whether you are currently using the Personas add-on. The site also suggests more you might enjoy based on what you choose to wear.

2. New features: With your feedback and support, we integrated features like search, and favorites. We also added features to the Personas add-on itself to make it easier for you to discover and manage your persona designs directly from the little fox in the lower left corner of your browser chrome. (see 1.4 announcement and video).

3. More designs: Personas 1.0 launched with less than 150 designs. Thanks to a growing community of contributors and artists, the Personas gallery will likely welcome its 40,000th design by the end of this year. The gallery also includes affinity art from Harry Potter, Vans, Bob Marley, Lilly Pulitzer, and Greenpeace.

4. Easier discovery: To let you discover new artists and designs, we sorted the Personas gallery by “up and coming” designs. This allows you to quickly view personas designs that are gaining popularity in the Personas community. You can also easily switch your view to sort by “popular” or “just added”.

5. Localization underway: the localization and web development teams have worked to make the site localizeable. If you want to join the effort, you can do so here. Thanks to our community of volunteers, many localization efforts are underway, with some nearly complete.

Thanks!

Like all Mozilla projects, Personas is a collaboration between people who develop the product and people who use it. The following people (and many more) have been commited to this product’s success:

NinaBella, Digital Blasphemy, MaDonna, and thousands of other artists around the globe that give millions of Firefox browsers a personalized look and feel. They are the heroes of this project.
Shae Rivard, who has supported the resolution of over 250 issues on the Personas discussion forum, as well as over 500 other members, whose feedback, testing, and contributions continuously make the product better.
Chris Howse for developing a creative vision for the Personas 2.0 site, and Ryan Doherty for implementing and for developing the screencast above.
Myk Melez, Toby Elliot, and Zandr Milewski, with the support of Erik van Eykelen, and Jose Bolanos, for collaborating with community feedback to constantly improve on the product. Collaboratively, the development team has fixed over 300 issues since launch.
Carsten Book (a.k.a. Tomcat), Stephen Donner, Tony Chung, Krupa Raj, and Vishal Kamdar, for assuring quality releases, and for doing so within incredibly tight deadlines.
Amy Zehren, Sean Martell, Catherine Brady, and Julie Martin, with the support of Monique Johnson, who have reached out to countless brands around the globe to share the Mozilla story, and offer them the opportunity to participate in a growing movement.
Tara Shahian, Mary Colvig, Melissa Shapiro, John Slater, Sarah Doherty, Jay Patel, and all the other members of the marketing community that helped build awareness around Personas.
Seth Bindernagel, Staś Małolepszy, Pascal Chevrel, and all the Persona localizers on Babelzilla (AtteL, dogi, drry, Ersen Yoldac, fernph, Funkin2x, funTomas, Joergen, jojaba, jooliaan, kkemenczy, kustodian, Lisman, lois, loveleeyoungae, moZes, pia, SiiiE, spjutster, steekid, stoyan, Wareczek, and wtspout), who worked diligently to ensure that Personas is accessible in as many languages as possible.

What’s Next?

As Personas crosses 10.5 million downloads and prepares to welcome its 40,000th community design, we will continue make the product even better and easier to use. To continue to evolve Personas quickly, and in the right direction, we need your feedback and participation. Join the conversation in the discussion forum and add helpful hints to the support wiki. And stay tuned to this blog for updates!

- Ryan Doherty and Suneel Gupta on behalf of the Personas development team

Student Signatures Art Competition Winners

Myk Melez — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:25:53 +0000

Personas announces winners of the first-ever Student Signatures Art Competition

Over the past few months, artists have been working diligently to create Personas that would inspire and intrigue those around them and enter these design into the first Personas Student Signatures Art Competition. The competition was designed to give artists at all levels, and from all areas of the world, the opportunity to share their creations with millions of Firefox users.

We are excited to announce the three winning students from this competition. Their entries were a hit within the Personas community and received high marks from a panel of judges.

Top Design:
Space Station Holiday created by John LeMasney

Runners Up:

Electro Muse created by Manuel Alejandro Regalado Solís

Splatters created by Ben Rollins

The top design artist John Le Masney is earning his Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership at Rider University and Personas was part of his final project. Le Masney told us that he “jumped at the chance to get involved and do everything I can to forward open source and Firefox in particular.”

A special thank you to our panel of expert judges Alan Bamberger, Anna Sui, Greg Storey, Mitchell Baker, and Timothy Hogan who took time out of their busy schedules to judge this competition.

Please be on the lookout for our next competition!

- Amy Zehren and Suneel Gupta on behalf of the Personas development team

Personas: 10 Million and Growing

Myk Melez — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:45:47 +0000

The Personas movement continues to grow with over 10 million people choosing to personalize their Firefox.

What Has Changed?

Since Personas was launched earlier this year, over 10 million people around the globe have chosen to personalize their Firefox by downloading Personas. Here is a quick look at what else has happened since the launch:

Nearly 35,000 designs were contributed from artists at all levels of experience from all parts of the world (over 1,000 designs / week).
Over 450 community members have shared ideas and feedback on the Personas forum.
Nearly 40 affinity brands, including Harry Potter, Bob Marley, Lady Gaga, and Greenpeace have added their content to the gallery.
Using community feedback, the Personas development team has released 13 upgrades (4 add-on, 9 website releases) in order to add features like Favorites.
Localization community has diligently translated the add-on into over 25 languages; Personas website will be localized by the end of the year.

Thanks!

NinaBella, Digital Blasphemy, MaDonna, and thousands of other artists around the globe that give millions of Firefox browsers a personalized look and feel. They are the heroes of this project.
Shae Rivard, who has supported the resolution of over 200 issues on the Personas discussion forum, as well as over 450 other members, whose feedback, testing, and contributions continuously make the product better.
Ryan Doherty, Myk Melez, Toby Elliot, and Zandr Milewski, with the support of Erik van Eykelen, and Jose Bolanos, for collaborating with community feedback to constantly improve on the product. Collaboratively, the development team has fixed over 300 issues since launch.
Carsten Book (a.k.a. Tomcat), Stephen Donner, Tony Chung, Krupa Raj, and Vishal Kamdar, for assuring quality releases, and for doing so within incredibly tight deadlines.
Amy Zehren, Sean Martell, Catherine Brady, and Julie Martin, with the support of Monique Johnson, who have reached out to countless brands around the globe to share the Mozilla story, and offer them the opportunity to participate in a growing movement.
Tara Shahian, Mary Colvig, Melissa Shapiro, John Slater, Sarah Doherty, Jay Patel, and all the other members of the marketing community that helped build awareness around Personas.
Seth Bindernagel, Staś Małolepszy, Pascal Chevrel, and all the Persona localizers on Babelzilla (AtteL, dogi, drry, Ersen Yoldac, fernph, Funkin2x, funTomas, Joergen, jojaba, jooliaan, kkemenczy, kustodian, Lisman, lois, loveleeyoungae, moZes, pia, SiiiE, spjutster, steekid, stoyan, Wareczek, and wtspout), who worked diligently to ensure that Personas is accessible in as many languages as possible.
Rainer Cvillink who, on a shoestring budget, imaginatively developed the original Personas video:

Getting Started with Personas from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo.

What’s Next?

Between now and 20 million downloads, we’re looking to make this feature even better and easier to use. To continue to evolve Personas quickly, and in the right direction, we need your feedback and participation. Join the conversation in the discussion forum and add helpful hints to the support wiki. And stay tuned to this blog for updates!

- Suneel Gupta & Myk Melez on behalf of the Personas development team

Personas 1.4 Released

Myk Melez — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:46:02 +0000

Personas gets a set of new features that lets you discover new art, rotate through your favorites, and undo.
With feedback from the Personas community, Labs recently released Personas 1.4. Here is a video describing some of the features:

Introducing Personas 1.4 from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo.

What you can Expect from 1.4

1. More From the Designer: Say you’re browsing through the Personas gallery and pick a design you like. The next day, you want to know whether the designer has created any other cool designs. Before, you would need to go to getpersonas.com and either search for the designer name or find the design you liked and click on the designer by-line. Now, you can simply click on your extension (the little fox on the bottom left corner of your screen), mouse to the top of the menu, and then mouse right to the submenu.

2. Favorites: In the last version of Personas, we enabled you to easily favorite any Persona design in the gallery and have it instantly accessible in the “my favorites” section of your menu (see more about the 1.3 release).

3. More From the Category: Say you’re in the mood for a Holiday persona design. Within the extension menu, you mouse through the Holiday category but can’t find anything you like. Before, you needed to navigate to the Holiday gallery by navigating to getpersonas.com and finding the Holiday gallery. Now you can get there in one step by clicking “More From Holiday” in the extension.

4. Undo: Personas gives you the ability to preview a design before you select it. But still, maybe you chose a design and instantly regret the decision. Before, to undo you would need to go to “recently selected” designs in your extension menu and click on the last design you were wearing. Now, an undo notification bar drops down every time you select a design that you haven’t used recently, or haven’t marked as a favorite.

Get Personas 1.4

If you are already using Personas 1.3, Firefox will automatically update it to Personas 1.4 the next time it checks for add-ons updates. If you aren’t using Personas yet, or you want to get the new version immediately, install it at getpersonas.com.

Thanks!

Many thanks to Erik van Eykelen, Jose Bolanos, Ryan Doherty, Carsten Book (a.k.a. Tomcat), Toby Elliott, Zandr Milewski, and all the Personas localizers on Babelzilla (AtteL, dogi, drry, Ersen Yoldac, fernph, Funkin2x, funTomas, Joergen, jojaba, jooliaan, kkemenczy, kustodian, Lisman, lois, loveleeyoungae, moZes, pia, SiiiE, spjutster, steekid, stoyan, Wareczek, and wtspout), who did great work to make this feature possible, along with all the folks in the discussion forum who suggested the feature, tested early versions of it, and reported problems!

What’s Next?

We’re looking to make this feature even better and easier to use. To continue to evolve Personas quickly, and in the right direction, we need your feedback and participation. Join the conversation in the discussion forum and add helpful hints to the support wiki. And stay tuned to this blog for updates!

- Suneel Gupta and Myk Melez on behalf of the Personas development team