Jorge Villalobos
Ideas, technology and the occasional rant

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Firefox + Naked women? Sign me up!

There's a new Firefox fan site, called Femfox, which will raise a lot of eyebrows and hopefully will help promote Firefox on a very different level than has been done so far. It uses the power of sex appeal to attract people to Firefox advertisements, which is something that Firefox campaigns have lacked until now.
If you go to the Downloads section, you'll find that the site launched with a significant amount of material already available. There's already 5 desktop backgrounds / flyers, for some reason called Episodes, with very high resolutions available. There's everything from geeky fun (Episode 5) to real user concerns (Episode 6) and good ol' eye candy (Episode 3). Obviously there's plenty of Firefox info for the uninitiated, but the site it mostly a project to export to the rest of the world.
I know that a lot of other SFXers have done a great share of promotional material. Specifically, I know about Ken Saunders with MouseRunner and Billy with Firefox roxr (currently down). Still, their efforts are aimed to a more knowledgable crowd, in terms of what the Internet and Firefox are. If people don't know what a browser is, how can we convince them to click on an add that says "The browser you can trust"? Well, I think this site is part of the answer. The average Joe needs beer, pizza and some skin. This site exploits one of them to a very good extent.
  • "Whoa, hello sexy... hmm, what is this Firefox thing?"
  • * clicks *
  • "A browser?"
  • * minor disapointment *
  • (x% of the time) "Ehh, what the hell, let's give it a shot"
I'm thinking that x must be close to 30. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but it's a good thing to be :). Hopefully people will realize that this is not some tasteless stunt, but just a different way to make Firefox more... human. Hopefully, people will join this project and perhaps candx is on her way to Internet stardom, just like Ellen Feiss.
So, if you would like to help making Firefox sexy, or sexier, or just enjoy the view, visit Femfox.com and give your opinions and ideas on the site forums. Also, check the Overview page and see if you spot any familiar names :). For today, there's a new banner for you. Enjoy.