Mozilla Crowdsources Future of the Internet

The blogosphere is abuzz around the latest initiative named concept series by Mozilla to find out what internet users actually want the internet future to be like. Sure, for Mozilla as the creator of Firefox the most important thing is how what we expect of our browsers - they really seem to want to make our browsing experience a perfect one (and I do hope they will succeed since even on their own every new version of Firefox is better than the previous one).

So the guys from Mozilla Labs called for internet users to submit their ideas, mockups and prototypes for the future of an internet browser as these participants want it to be.

But the concept is merely a concept: Mozilla does not promise to implement any of the concepts it receives in the submission process. The only two things that are definitely to be done by Mozilla are distribution and discussion of the submissions. Hopefully the discussion process will determine what exactly the users view as the most appealing concepts and really want to use in the future.

The three initial concepts (you can view all of them right in the blog post calling for submissions) were created by professionals willing to participate (and obviously get some extra exposure for themselves) but Mozilla invites everyone - even people without any coding skills - to participate and help them determine what the internet browsing future should be like. Some of the submissions already started to appear on Flickr tagged with "mozconcept" and I will be sure to subscribe to the submissions myself to track what the ideas will be like. As of now I can only see two submissions (both copyrighted unfortunately) but I hope to see more in thecoming days.

But there's at least one problem that I see in this initiative: people rarely agree with each other even on minor questions, let alone the huge ones like the future of internet or a browser. And I can imagine that many of the submitted ideas or visions will be very different and will even contradict each other in some cases. So if Mozilla engineers will eventually use some of the concepts submitted in the future development of Firefox, they will anyway have to choose what they like better themselves. So no matter how fascinated by crowdsourcing we (and Mozilla) may be, in this case a good portion of those submitting ideas will be disappointed anyway.

Another problem for Mozilla itself is that probably the entire process will even result in a number of competitive browsers launched based on the ideas submitted for Mozilla simply because good ideas rarely stay unnoticed by savvy web developers and VCs.