This will be about cookies (the browser ones) – and why they are such a mess (at least from my personal point of view). To start this off on the right foot (and to quote my favorite TV chef): “Cookies are pretty f’ed”.

First things first…

Let’s start with the reason why cookies exist: In the beginning (aka 1995) cookies were invented by Netscape to provide a persistent storage mechanism for stuff such as shopping carts. Generally a good idea – but unfortunately the way cookies were engineered had major flaws: Cookies can only be set, modified and read by the originating domain (e.g. when you visit a webpage on http://www.example.com, servers in this domain can access only cookies set by servers in the same domain, i.e. “example.com”). This in theory is a good security measure – but the original spec allowed cookies to not only be issued by HTML pages but also GIFs. This in turn led to the “GIF cookie loophole” — if the website at http://www.example.com includes a GIF image which comes from http://www.advertiser.com, then suddenly advertiser.com can set a cookie on your computer as well (although you never visited their website – “seeing” the GIF is enough). Advertisers started to exploit this loophole by using tiny 1×1 transparent pixels (Tracking Pixel), whose sole purpose was to serve you a cookie.

The advent of the mega-networks

All this is hardly a nuisance as long as the companies setting these tracking pixels “see” only a tiny fraction of your online activity. But what happened in reality was that the ad networks (the entities which set the tracking pixels) got larger and larger – until they became massive networks which have their tracking pixels on all larger (and many smaller) web properties. Suddenly a company such as DoubleClick (now part of Google) or Atlas (now part of Microsoft) can track you across numerous websites you visit and learn how you interact with their ads. Combine the power of Google’s AdSense (which is deployed on millions of small websites) with DoubleClick’s ad-server (one of the most used ad-server products in the world) and you can only begin to imagine how rich the dataset about you, your browsing behaviour, your preferences and ultimately you as a person is (or at least can be).

The fun begins: Integrated networks

If this sounds scary, meet your new friend: Integrated networks – Now that large companies like Google and Facebook run their own ad networks (and in the case of Google also one of the most popular web analytics services), they take tracking a couple of levels up from here: Suddenly their ability to track you multiplies, as many sites incorporate their tracking, their ad network code and and their syndicated login mechanisms (e.g. Facebook Connect).

Let me illustrate these points: Assume you visited blog X which runs Google Analytics for their web analytics, after that you visited community site Y which has ads served through Google’s AdSense network and then decide to visit the large media site Z which serves display ads using the DoubleClick ad server and network. Google has now “seen” you on all three properties and can build a rich profile about you, your habits and preferences. To illustrate the danger of this, have a look at Gaydar – a little Facebook application which uses only a few data points to determine (with startling accuracy) if you are gay.

More fun: Redirects

Wanna take it up a notch? Server Redirects are a common occurrence in ad serving these days – and multiply the amount of cookies you get served plus increase your exposure to be profiled. Here’s how it works: Website X has a placement for an ad. Website X’s ad-server doesn’t have an appropriate ad for you (due to targeting, frequency capping, etc) and redirects the request for the ad to another ad network. This ad network serves a cookie (or reads the existing cookie if it was set already) and might or might not deliver an ad. If this ad network doesn’t deliver an ad it might redirect the request to yet another ad network – and so on. As a result you end up with dozen of cookies on your machine – from visiting a single page. Note that this does not require you to ever interact with any of those ad networks – they simply can track you now on even more sites. And there is a whole cottage industry which picks up these “junk ads” and delivers their ads on the back of other networks.

Still not convinced? Cookie Stuffing

That all sounds broken enough? Merely! Meet your next new friend “cookie stuffing“. In the world of affiliate advertising (another extremely popular form of distributed advertising) the affiliate marketeer who sets you the last cookie before you make a transaction on the partner website gets the marketing money. Take all you learned about cookies so far and add a good portion of bad business ethics and you arrive at cookie stuffing – you simply simulate clicks onto a bunch of affiliate ads and thus stuff the users’ browser with your cookies.

It’s getting better…

Cookies (and their current implementation) are bad enough as they are. But at least you can clean them out pretty easily (in Firefox for example you can delete all cookies by going to Preferences>Privacy>Show Cookies). If you have Flash installed (and chances are you have), a website can set a Flash Cookie (LSOs – Local Shared Objects) which can be significantly larger than a standard cookie (i.e. more data about you) and are pretty much impossible to manage (no direct management interface unless you stumble across a very well hidden explanation on how to control them).

What you can do today

There’s a bunch of rather simple options for you to get yourself out of this mess: If you use Firefox, you can install something like the Ghostery Firefox Add-on, which not only informs you about tracking cookies but also can reject them on your behalf. You also can install the TACO (Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out) Add-on which automatically installs no-tracking cookies from the most popular ad networks. To protect yourself from Flash LSOs you can modify the settings for your local Flash install using this URL and manage them through the Better Privacy Add-on. Similar extensions exist for other browsers as well.

What we need to do in the future

I personally believe that cookies are now broken to an extent that we need to replace them with something more usable – both for users and advertisers. Users should have the ability to easily determine what they want to share with advertisers (don’t forget: cookies allow serving of more relevant ads – something which a lot of people don’t object). Advertisers need a robust mechanism to track users (who opt in) and protect them from practices like cookie stuffing.

I’m crazily obsessed with focus and productivity (to the point that I can get quite annoying for some). Yesterday Mick Liubinskas, co-founder and web strategist at Pollenizer (very likely one of the best companies to help you build and grow your web business), took time out of his busy schedule, spent the afternoon & evening with Mozilla and kindly presented a brownbag on the the wider topic of “Focus or Fail”.

You’ll find his presentation here and a video recording of talk soon on Air Mozilla.

Mick’s talk was an excellent overview of why focus matters, how focus directly influences your results and how to obtain focus (or re-focus). The one method which impressed me more than anything else (and really drives down the point) is this super-simple exercise:

Grab a whiteboard and divide it into three columns:

• The first column contains your absolute focus – the one thing/area you really, really want to do. Remember: One thing. Not two or three. One!
• The second column contains your do’s – the things you need to do, to reach your goal. Keep it brutally short. If you have more than 3, cut. You will only spread yourself too thin.
• The third column contains your don’ts – all the things you don’t want to do. The longer this list, the better. And don’t forget: If you encounter these things in your workday – don’t do them! They just keep you from achieving your goals.

Give it a try – it sounds simple but is really hard. And if you do this right you will have lots of heated discussions around this!

Fun stuff…

Since a little while we are hacking on a collaborative open innovation tool which will become the central piece of infrastructure for the Concept Series and our Design Challenges.

Ryan Snyder, our genius coder, has put the first alpha version of Chocolate Factory online and we are currently working through some of the kinks of it.

Once we have the major blockers out of the way (within the next couple of days) we would love to invite you to test, refine and develop Chocolate Factory with us – specifically we need help with:

• Testing (Functionality, Workflows, Bugs)
• User Flows
• User Interface Design
• Feature Requests

and once we have Chocolate Factory to a level where the code is stable and all base functionality is implemented: Coding (PHP with the Kohana framework).

If you’re interested in helping us – please drop me an email to pfinette {at} mozilla {dot} com and we’ll send you an invite once we have Chocolate Factory live. And please do join the discussion.

It only has been seven months since we started our inaugural Design Challenge — In those short seven months we held two large Design Challenges, one smaller event-based challenge (around SxSW) and in collaboration with the student organization SOCHI a series of Design Jams.

In preparation for our next round of Design Challenges, Design Jams and Design Sprints we analyzed our past experiences, discussed with participants, partners & the wider community. Our key findings are below – feel free to share, analyze and discuss.

Key Learnings

• A more open and less demanding approach (in terms of requirements towards the submission) yield significantly more results (e.g. targeted at students & requiring a prototype vs. open to all & production of a mockup and video)
• More specific questions tend to generate more relevant & higher quality results (narrow vs. open field)
• The quality of submitted concepts followed a typical Pareto distribution (80/20 rule)
• High quality submissions tend to come either from experienced practitioners or groups of students who worked with their school on the challenge (as part of a course for example)

What’s Next?

As mentioned in my earlier blog post, we are currently preparing a round of Design Challenges, Design Jams and Design Sprints with universities around the world. We also prepare another open Design Challenge for this quarter – stay tuned & please don’t hesitate to contact us/me if you have any questions, suggestions, ideas… We love to hear from you!

Only seven months ago we launched our inaugural Mozilla Labs Design Challenge and invited students from around to the global to find solutions & develop concepts for the question “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was?”. 50 students from across all continents joined us for an amazing 10-week long journey with lots of online courses/classes, lively discussion on the forums and created 18 artifacts in the end.

Three months ago we launched our Summer 09 Design Challenge – this time with a much broader participation approach, the help of the wonderful folks at IxDA and Johnny Holland, a different question and some tweaks in the setup. Nearly 130 submissions were made, again from individuals and teams from all around the world.

We’ve also experimented with Design Jams, conceptualized and tested Design Sprints, spoke to dozen of schools, professors and students, held meetings and invited the wider community to work with us on this experiment in Open Innovation.

We are truly overwhelmed by your reactions – your passion, energy, creativity and feedback. In the last couple of weeks we took the learnings and experiences, combined them with your feedback and wishes, and developed new, exciting ideas for the future of Design Challenges and Open Innovation.

As a next step we would love to work with universities and schools in the wider area of user interface, user experience, human-computer-interaction and engineering.

Is that you?

We wan to run programs (challenges, jams, sprints) tailored to your courses and to your specific requirements – and together we want to create more solutions for interesting & challenging questions in the Open Web.

Not only do we want to create artifacts with you (concepts, mockups, prototypes), which would be made available under open licenses – but we also want to freely share those experiences, and processes, so that others may learn.

Interested? Please drop me an email (pfinette {at} mozilla {dot} com).

When we created the voting scripts for our lastest Design Challenge – one for the public “People’s Choice” award and another one for the panelist votes on our four “Best in Class” honors, we turned to the wider community to get some help with developing these (if you haven’t noticed – I’m a terrible coder!).

Dave Hunsberger and Paul Shen kindly sat down and developed two wonderful, little scripts which simply work like a charm – more than 2,500 votes later, we are happy to release the code into the open – download both voting scripts here.

The scripts are developed in PHP, use a mySQL backend and some AJAX stardust. They are licensed under a MIT license (so you can basically do with them what you want) and without any warranty whatsoever. Please note that I might not be able to give you any support (as mentioned – I’m a really bad coder) and are released as-is.

Hope you find them somewhat useful. If you end up using them somewhere – drop us a line, we would love to see them in action somewhere else.

Just a few weeks ago we asked the wider community to share their ideas around the question “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

126 submitted concepts later and four “Best in Class” honors as well as a “People’s Choice” award wait to be bestowed in the next few days. But we also had our snafu moment – the team from Pinpoint Logic, a user experience design group located in Portland, Oregon, submitted two concepts which somehow didn’t reach us. And as these concepts are now unfortunately not part of our Design Challenge and are in fact really wonderful, I would like to give them some breathing space:

Page Drawer and Tab Grouping Menu | Mockup

Radial Tab Menu and History Browser | Mockup

Apologies again to the team from Pinpoint Logic for the hiccup – and thank you for your concepts!

After having received a staggering 126 concepts from individuals and teams alike, we closed the public voting for the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer ‘09 “People’s Choice Award” (what a mouthful — I guess we need to come up with a funky acronym…) on Sunday night.  Around the same time our nine panelists were busy getting their votes in.

The panelists vote in two rounds: In the first round the panelists voted in groups of three people each on a third of the total concepts per group. In the second round all panelists will vote on the highest ranked concepts from the first round — in both rounds the panelists vote separately in the four categories innovation, interaction, execution and producible.

We expect to have the final votes in the next few days – and will bestow the honors in the four “Best in Class” categories as well as the “People’s Choice Award” on Monday, July 13th.

To make make the nerve-racking and nail-biting time until then a bit more fun – here are some stats from both the “People’s Choice” award as well as the first round of “Best in Class” voting:

“People’s Choice” Award

We received a total of 1,480 valid votes. These votes are spread across 103 (out of 126) concepts – which is interesting: You would think that at least the person submitting her/his concept would vote for their own concept?! The average number of votes per concepts is 14.4 with a median of 6. The top 10 concepts received 44% of all votes, with the top 20% of concepts receiving 69.5% of all votes (which means we have a more even distribution than the typical Pareto distribution / “80/20 rule”).

“Best in Class” Honors

Our nine panelists show a very even voting pattern: The average/medians in the categories innovation, interaction, execution and producible are 5.2/5 — 5.1/5 — 5.3/5 and 5.7/6 respectively.  The distribution of 10’s (10 being the highest score) in the four categories are 2 — 4 — 6 and 6.  Looking at the distribution of 9-star and 8-star ratings (9 — 9 — 15 — 21 and 8 — 19 — 26 — 43) reveals that the panelists were obviously pretty impressed by the submissions in general – especially in the categories execution and producible.

And the winners are… Well – check back on Monday!

P.S.: This blog post is dedicated to Ken “The Numerator” Kovash. May his spreadsheets beam with joy!

On May 14th we initiated our second Design Challenge – this time around the question “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?” (head over to the microsite to get the full scoop). IxDA and Johnny Holland as well as eight schools from three continents supported the challenge.

Six weeks later and more than 120 concepts were submitted – from all around the world. Submissions came from designers, students, UX professionals – literally from all areas of the wider community. One example worth pointing out is Faber Ludens, a school from Brazil, who integrated the Design Challenge into their courseware (learn more about this amazing effort on their website).

Now it’s time for our nine panelists to go through the submissions, vote, leave feedback and choose the four “Best in Class” honors in the categories innovation, interaction, execution and producible.

And we would love to get your feedback: Vote for your preferred entry and help us bestow the “People’s Choice” Award. All you need to do, is to head over to our showcase site, select your personal favorite and vote.

The wonderful voting applications was developed by Dave Hunsberger, a web developer who enjoys playing with all the newest web technologies & standards, and an avid proponent and user of open-source software and ideas. He currently works for Potomac Digitek, a web development firm in Gaithersburg, MD. Dave can be found many days on twitter (@somewhatj8ed) and facebook. His favorite language is php, and he tries to use CodeIgniter whenever possible; yet seems to do a fair bit of coldfusion programming these days.

The equally as wonderful voting app for our panelists was developed by Paul Shen, a computer scientist and interaction designer currently attending Carnegie Mellon University. He loves the web, music, photography, and hacking all of the above.

A huge thank you to both Dave & Paul!

And now – go, have your say and vote!

Amine Zafri from Morocco, with 16 years the youngest participant in our inaugural Design Challenge and honoree of the “Best in Class: Execution” category, summarizes his experience with the Design Challenge:

Blog Post for My Participation in the Mozilla Design Challenge
The idea of participate in the design challenge came to me by reading an article talking about this challenge. So I started drawing some sketches and then realize that these ideas can be useful if I develop them.

I was very impressed to see that all the participant was older than me but feel very happy when I known that I can participate thanks to Pascal =) . It was the start of an extraordinary experience.

The idea was to start from an idea, to a mockup and finish with a prototype. It was sometimes hard, but thanks to the participants that was always by my side to give me great feedbacks that helped me and also the tutoring sessions where I learned a lot and that thanks to very nice people for Mozilla.

After submitting the prototype, the voting phase started with a very impressive panel list that make us getting nervous =). But Finally, I was one of the winners and this was very exiting =D.

My experience in this challenge is unforgettable, I met people from different countries, different cultures, we work together, share ideas and feedbacks… And that was amazing! I also want to thank all the tutors and everyone who elaborate this challenge especially Pascal =).

I advice everyone who want to live an amazing experience to participate in the next challenges!

[NB: And don't forget - you can still participate in our current Design Challenge: Summer 09!]