Firefly.com (1995–1999) was a
community
A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, ...
website featuring
collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 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
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
and some business people from
Harvard Business School, including
Pattie Maes
Pattie Maes (born 1961) is a professor in MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directed the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group. Previously, she founded and ran the Software Agents group. She served for several years as ...
(Media Lab professor), Upendra Shardanand,
Nick Grouf, 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
A recommender system, or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing 'system' with a synonym such as platform or engine), is a subclass of information filtering system that provide suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular ...
called HOMR (Helpful Online Music Recommendation Service; preceded by RINGO, an email-based system) which used
collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 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
A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, ...
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
Consumer privacy is information privacy as it relates to the consumers of products and services.
A variety of social, legal and political issues arise from the interaction of the public's potential expectation of privacy and the collection and ...
protection in the digital age. They also were key contributors to OPS (Open Profiling Standard), a recommendation to the
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
(along with
Netscape and
VeriSign
Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the , , and gene ...
) to what eventually became known as the
P3P (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
A Microsoft account or MSA (previously known as Microsoft Passport, .NET Passport, and Windows Live ID) is a single sign-on Microsoft user account for Microsoft customers to log in to Microsoft services (like Outlook.com), devices running on on ...
.
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
Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 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