Firefly.com (1995–1999) was a
community website featuring
collaborative filtering.
History
The Firefly website was created by Firefly Network, Inc.(originally known as Agents Inc.) The company was founded in March 1995 by a group of engineers from
MIT Media Lab and some business people from
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA p ...
, including
Pattie Maes (Media Lab professor), Upendra Shardanand,
Nick Grouf
Nick Grouf is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. Described as a "pioneer of the Web 1.0 generation", Grouf is the co-founder and managing director of Alpha Edison, a venture capital fund, and the founder of Clementine Capital, ...
, Max Metral, David Waxman and Yezdi Lashkari.
At the Media Lab, under the supervision of Maes, some of the engineers built a music
recommendation system called HOMR (Helpful Online Music Recommendation Service; preceded by RINGO, an email-based system) which used
collaborative filtering to help navigate the music domain to find other artists and albums that a user might like. With Matt Bruck and Khinlei Myint-U, the team wrote a business plan and Agents Inc took second place in the 1995 MIT 10K student business plan competition. Firefly's core technology was based on the work done on HOMR.
The Firefly website was launched in October 1995.
It went through several iterations but remained a
community throughout. It was initially created as a community for users to navigate and discover new musical artists and albums. Later it was changed to allow users to discover movies, websites, and communities as well.
Firefly technology was adopted by a number of well-known businesses, including the recommendation engine for barnesandnoble.com, ZDnet, launch.com (later purchased by Yahoo) and MyYahoo.
Since Firefly was amassing large amounts of profile data from its users, privacy became a big concern of the company.
They worked with the Federal Government to help define
consumer privacy protection in the digital age. They also were key contributors to OPS (Open Profiling Standard), a recommendation to the
W3C (along with
Netscape
Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...
and
VeriSign) to what eventually became known as the
P3P
The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) is an obsolete protocol allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about web browser users. Designed to give users more control of their personal information when ...
(Platform for Privacy Preferences).
In April 1998, Microsoft purchased Firefly, presumably because of their innovations in privacy, and their long-term goal of creating a safe marketplace for consumers' profile data which the consumer controlled.
The Firefly team at Microsoft was largely responsible for the first versions of
Microsoft Passport.
Microsoft shut down the website in August 1999.
Homepages
The Firefly website had distinctive design and graphics. Early designs featured bright colors and a fun and eclectic look. Later redesigns reflected the company's push towards corporate customers and desire to de-emphasize the Firefly community website.
File:Firefly-website-homepage-1996-12-28.png, Firefly homepage circa 1996 ("Tilted Bullseye")
File:Firefly-website-homepage-1997-04-12.png, Firefly homepage circa 1997 ("Economist Red")
File:Firefly-website-homepage-1998-12-01.png, Firefly homepage circa 1998 ("Passport Please")
See also
*
Collaborative filtering
References
External links
Spanish Firefly - a Suck.com parody*
{{Microsoft
American social networking websites
Social information processing
Social software
Internet properties established in 1995
Defunct websites