It’s great to see that there are already over 3000 downloads of the Cluster Tabs for Firefox add-on within the first week of launch without any direct promotion by us yet.
We’ve been rolling out the service while attempting to ‘do things right’ in terms of having had a pre-release testing period of two weeks with around 400 users before going public last week and slowing growing to over 3000 downloads of the Cluster Tabs for Firefox add-on in our first public week.
The feedback we’ve had from our fellow humans in our first week has been encouraging, here’s a couple of notable comments we found on twitter:
Trying Cluster tabs for Firefox and loving it!! http://twitter.com/epedreno
Quite possibly the most brilliant FF add-on. Really http://twitter.com/timdunlop
In the interests of balance, we had one complaint via the Mozilla add-ons site from a user who didn’t realize that Cluster Tabs have Public web addresses. We understand that sometimes people like to dive right in and not read the packaging, we do it too sometimes ourselves, like people who find out drinks are too hot or food is too spicy the hard way. We understand the confusion, our bad so we’ll think of better ways to make it clearer that cluster tabs have public (anonymous) URLs. The good news here is that we provided what we think is good support, reached out via email, removed the cluster on request and explained why Cluster Tabs are public so they can be socially shared and we think our co-human was happy at the end of the day albeit suffering from a chalky tongue.
So lets all sing after three… one, two, three… ”Ooooh, cluster tabs are public. Public cluster tabs are.” & repeat.
btw – did you know cluster tabs are public? No seriously, joking apart…
All Cluster Tabs have public URLs that you can share with others. But don’t worry they are anonymous too which means no one knows who created them. At the end of the day, all your sharing in the clusterurl.com address are links to pages already on the web.
Clusterurl.com pages do not have any of your browsing history attached with them, that information is stored on your computer only.
We think that social sharing of Clusters is one of the cornerstones of the product and the thing we get most excited about here. Our dream is to find a cluster of something really useful, just at the right moment when we were looking for something. That would be neat! Until then we are enjoying having a clutter free tabbed browsing experience!
We have also had a lot of people ask us to enable ‘private clusters. It’s probably best we make a separate blog post about it because this one is becoming too long already. We’d welcome your input and thoughts on the subject though. For now we celebrate the fact that all Clusters are public for everyone to benefit from.
So what’s new after week one?
We’ve been busy working on polishing Firefox add-on code re-factoring while improving efficiency of the back end service but that isn’t what interests most people, so you’ll be glad to know we’ve added some useful features too!
From today you’ll be able to update your Cluster Tabs for Firefox add-on (to version 1.0.3) to enable you to post public cluster tabs directly to Friendfeed and Mozillaca in addition to the Facebook and Twitter which were already there. We’ve also added a nice little visual feature that lets you know that your cluster tab has been posted successfully too.
You’ll also me able to right web links on any page and add them to clusters too without having to open the page they are linked to. A small but helpful little feature non the less.
For the Uber geeks amongst us, you’ll no doubt be excited to tell your friends that you can now add tabs to clusters via the right click ‘tab context menu” which is great for people who want to disable the “+” button on tabs in the add-on preference settings.
If your a human who clusters, thanks we hope you’ll like what we have in store for you in future months.
If not please take the Cluster Tabs for Firefox add-on for a test ride, you’ll be glad you did, phew no more tab overload!
Happy Clustering :)
1 response so far ↓
Kapil // July 2, 2009 at 6:00 am |
Hey,
Dats a really simple but Genius Add-on application developed since quite some time, since its utility value is too much. I find its an apt Add-on for a person like me – a web-developer who needs to keep opening number of tabs Every-day relating to a project, if not this Add-on i hv to keep the Tabs open while closing the Firefox to save that session for my Next day.. n also wen i am working on few of the tabs & not others.
After all said.. i believe there is some room of expansion which can lead the App. to new highs.. like
- Ability to Name Individual Tabs in a Cluster of set of Tabs (default being the Title of the page),
- Ability to Re-fetch & generate new screenshot Thumbnail anytime,
- Ability to Save tabs as Private tab with may be a private share Key,
- lastly Ability to save the Uname/password for the tabs,so i can just open my Mail accounts without even need to enter in the Login details everyday… (ofcourse this has to be again Private Tabs as well but not shared)….
I know this could be too much of things to ask for… but it’ll eventually help to get you ahead of future competitors..Also if possible from ur side … i’ll be Happy to extend a helping hand with my Web-developement (read PHP/MYSQL/JS/HTML/CSS..) Knowledge for betterment of this Cool Add-on..
Thanks a Lot