thoughts on mozilla

Recently, Mozilla employees and community members have started using the mzl.la domain for URL shortening on Twitter.

A quick glance at the whois information shows the domain being owned by Reed Loden, a community member. A bit more digging shows that he indeed is hosting the site as well.

How one adds new URLs to the service isn’t clear, as the domain directs to the Mozilla Foundation’s website.

Today, Apple released a brand new website that showcases HTML5 features. This is very similar to the Chrome Experiments website which Google launched last year. Of course, in true Apple fashion, the various showcases require Safari to view.

I do wonder… why hasn’t Mozilla launched a similar site. The hacks.mozilla.org site was meant to be something similar, but is much more tech-oriented. It’d be incredibly beneficial for Mozilla to organize several HTML5 demos across multiple sites, instead of doing it the Chrome or Apple way and creating their own demos.

Austin King, of the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) Web Development team, announced a new site he’s been working on called “sudosocial.me“.  On his personal blog, King also discusses how sudosocial.me is not unlike many other websites out there, but that it’s also unlike them in specific ways as well.

For the uninitiated, sudosocial.me is really just a typical life stream website that is not unlike Chris Blizzard’s (also a MoCo employee) whoisi.com. While that site is no longer online, it basically aggregated as many feeds as a person would like, under their name. Anyone could add or remove feeds.

sudosocial.me duplicates this feature, using the term “HomeStream” to define what is really simply a life stream. Of course, sudosocial.me regresses the social, anyone-can-edit nature of whoisi.com and adds the requirement of an account, despite King calling the site a way to “promote awareness of privacy issues”.

From the very basic design, it’s clear this site was thrown together fairly quickly and never received a pass through from even the most modest of UI designers. I would have preferred to see a revamp of whoisi.com instead of an all-new site.

Check out the video for an overview, then look at a basic HomeStream.