Hey, I’m Jarred. You may have forgotten me, but I write here sometimes! Seriously, though, sorry for my absence. Life’s been a little hectic lately — LSAT, birthday, and some other secret projects have all come between me and my blogging. Though you’ve heard it here a hundred times before, sorry for being lame.
This week, the Mozilla Foundation released a major upgrade to their increasingly popular Firefox browser. We’re big fans of Firefox because of its speed, safety, simplicity, and customizability. If you’re going to trust me on anything, trust me on this: give Firefox a try for one week. You’ll never go back to Internet Explorer again. (If you want to show Tropophilia some love, download Firefox using the button at the bottom of the left sidebar. - Ed.)
Today, I want to focus on some of the great add-ons that you can implement in Firefox. This where the true power of this browser comes into focus. Add-ons are “extensions” to Firefox, usually developed by third parties, that give you new features — sometimes eye candy, sometimes extremely useful.
For example, in the 20 seconds before beginning this paragraph, I browsed to Firefox’a recommended add-ons, read a brief snipper about URL Fixer (”URL Fixer corrects typos in URLs that you enter in the address bar. For example, if you type google.con, it will correct it to google.com”), and installed it in my browser. Boom — I just saved myself some future frustration.
Some add-ons like URL Fixer are so simple, you wonder why they’re not native to every browser. Others, however, are super-powerful and feature-rich.
However, my passion for social media was reinvigorated last week when I was directed to a web page where a friend was raising money to support her marathon run in honor of her college roommate’s struggle with cancer. I put the link up in my Gmail status and sent an email to some of my fellow classmates to let them know about it. Though I certainly can’t and wouldn’t claim to have made a huge impact, I think a few of the donors that day decided to act because of that simple message and link from a friend. By the end of the day, my friend had raised several hundred dollars, and as of today she has raised over $1,000 from over 25 donors.
A few weeks ago I wrote about 
While Facebook will begin scaling across the web, however, it has not embraced the “automation” side of Google’s philosophy. Indeed, in response to Facebook Connect, Google revealed the rest of their social networking plans today with the announcement of the similarly-named Google Friend Connect. Google’s VP of Engineering describes his company’s vision of the social web, and you can instantly see how it differs from Facebook’s:
