danah boyd has a great post up AOL's support for only IE on their new AIM Pages service, social network services in general, cluster effects, and browsers. I really cannot say it better than she can, so I will quote her liberally.
The important thing is that when you think about browser-access, you cannot simply think in terms of "90% market" because there's a decent probability that many of those 90% have critical connections to people who are in the 10%. You need to think in terms of clusters, not individuals, because it is clusters that will make your application work. People participate when all of their friends can.
Corporations force this through regulation software, but this is not how consumer markets work. Launching a beta of AIM Pages on IE-only is foolish at best. Sure, a lot of people will try it, but if their friends can't play, they won't really get into it. Meaningful activity won't spread unless entire clusters can play along. (Trying it out by creating an account is not the same as being active.)
Getting social applications going requires a baseline.... That baseline is that everyone can play along so that there's no structural barrier to network spread. This is why mobile shit is so hard to get off the ground. This is why getting people to download applications for social interaction is such a barrier to participation. Replicating this problem on the Internet is foolish at best. It doesn't matter if you're launching in beta - first impressions really do matter. If you're targeting an audience that's IE-only (like corporations), go for it. But if you're trying to go after a mainstream, younger audience, you're being idiotic if you think you can get away with not supporting Firefox or Safari. (And besides, if you're AOL, what on earth are you doing supporting Microsoft hegemony?)
apophenia: Cluster Effects and Browser Support (IE-only social software is idiotic)
You may want to double check the validity of the assertion that one cannot create an aimpage with firefox. It seems more functional with firefox than it does with ie7.
Danah says "if you're trying to go after a mainstream, younger audience, you're being idiotic if you think you can get away with not supporting Firefox or Safari", but even more to the point, a beta service which by definition whose initial uptake is with early adopters really is disadvantaged by not supporting alternative browsers which tend to have an increased share in the early adopter (=tech savvy) usergroup. IE most certainly doesn't have a 90% share in the early adopter market, the users who will be the ones blogging about the service and creating marketing buzz (or not).
BoingBoing had a post back in Dec 2005 where they said that their stats showed that Firefox had a greater share than IE as far as their visitors were concerned. I'm pretty sure that similar stats are quite common in other techy blogs and websites.
One possibility you may wish to consider is that Danah's assertion is incorrect. Specifically, Firefox *can* be used to build an Aimpage.
The set of ideas is interesting, but they are not relevant in this case.
It's a nice bit of theorizing, and I wish her the best in finding a real-world case to which it can be applied.
Ben,
I certainly am having difficulty in creating a _useable_ AIMPage, as when I tried to publish changes to the default page which is created, it hangs. and again. and again. (Using FF1.5.0.3 - the publish changes did work once, out of several attempts, but I don't have time to recreate attempted changes multiple times)
Perhaps it is just buggy generally, rather than buggy specifically with FF, I'm not going to waste time finding out if it works any better with IE. (if it is indeed a more general problem, it is perhaps
I just created a profile just to test things out, and I certainly don't need another SNS, especially seeing as I don't have a bunch of buddies on AIM.