Charles Arthur, from Guardian Unlimited released an article about the 1% rule, which uncovers some suprising statistics about users in the Web 2.0 world. Basically, only 1% of users will contribute content to an application or website while only 10% of users will comment or offer improvements. The other 89% will simply look at it. This is seen at YouTube, where there are �1,538 downloads per upload and 20m unique users per month�, and at Wikipedia, where an estimated 70% of articles are written by 1.8% of the users.

This figure may be frightening to web businesses that rely solely on user generated content or developer interaction. They’re essentially competing for a fraction of the 1% of traffic out there that’s willing to actively contribute anything to any cause. I believe this adds to the importance of reaching early adopters and technologically savvy users early in an application’s life. We�ve also noticed that active bloggers seem to play around with products and experiments a little more than the average user.

If your application isn’t driven by user created content, maybe allowing users to help out isn�t such a bad idea. Salesforce.com, for example, is experiencing success with their application sharing program, AppExchange. In order to get the builders building, they offer a share of the profits and some name recognition in exchange for applications that Salesforce users can quickly download and integrate into their workflow. It seems to be doing pretty well. Even though there are only 280 applications, tens of thousands of users have downloaded the pre-made apps. If you can somehow tap in to the 1% of your builders effectively to create content 89% of your users want, you might be on to something.

What makes a good extension?

In my opinion there are tons and tons of extensions out there that do “cool things” like tell you the weather.. but does anybody really have to know the weather every second of every day.. maybe but most people probably can go to a weather site each day, check the weather for the day and they are cool. I’m all for intergration but not at the cost of performance and wasting precious browser space for the weather seems a little silly to me. All this being said, I think the best Firefox extensions are ones that do actions that you might need to do over and over and over again. Mine are specifically tailored to SEO and Programming because these can be redudent tasks.

HTML Validator
TML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.

Total Validation
This is like a HTML Validator above but also tests spelling, and accessbility.

Measure It
Draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.

Web Designer Toolbar
The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

PDF Download
This extension, every time you click on a link, checks if the target is a pdf file and in this case let you choose what you want to do (open pdf file inside or outside Firefox, download it to the filesystem or view it as HTML).

One of the most popular plug-in’s for wordpress is wp-cache which basically stores a copy of all your pages already created to serve up to the world so the server doesn’t need to create these pages everytime a new visitor comes to your site. This is a completely great plugin if your getting hundreds, thousdands of visitors a day but the truth is, it also had some drawbacks, like the need to clear the cache everytime you update your design and test for validation. It has made the process of making my site British Disability Friendly significantly slower. So unless your serving up thousdands of pages per day… or not working on your design at all, turn off wp-cache, your design lwife will be significaltly less frustraiting.