For the past couple of weeks, Extension.fm hasn’t been working on my home Mac. Due to general busy-ness and specific laziness, I only contacted Dan about the problem a couple of days ago. Because he’s awesome, he helped me fix it right away. It now works again and all is right with the world.
On a related note, I don’t like calling Extension.fm a plugin. “Plugin” paints it with the wrong brush - the word makes it seem less valuable than it really is, like it’s something that can’t exist in its own right. Google calls them “extensions”, which I think is marginally better, but still doesn’t capture it. I think of it like this: It’s an application that sits within my browser.
I see a lot of startups that start out as browser “plugins” and sometimes, they are just that - a feature that is a nice add-on to a browser, but not something that could exist as an independent service. Increasingly though, some startups have “plugins” that are so feature rich, they deserve a better name. Partially this is marketing (which is not to be dismissed), but it’s also how you think about this part of your product - how you develop it, distribute and market it, and potentially even price it.
If you’re a startup and a plugin is your initial entry into the market, think seriously about what you could do as a constant presence in a user’s browsing experience and if the plugin itself could potentially be an application / product, versus just a feature of one.