Toronto Firefox Launch Party

I just got back from the Mozilla Firefox launch party in Toronto and I must say it was way cooler than I thought it would be. Geeks descended from all over Toronto. We got free beer, free tshirts, free food, free desserts and all kinds of free FireFox items. The whole night was really fun and I met a lot of really cool people.

Myself and two of my co-workers showed up a little after 6pm and spent the night hanging out with fellow geeks. I got to ask lots of questions about Mozilla and Firefox. I didn’t even know they had an office in Toronto before tonight. They expected 40 people to show up to the party and got over 120. The computers and large LCD screen had real time stats of the downloads happening in several countries. At one point it was over 5000 firefox downloads per minute. At the time of this writing Asia had still not woken up for Firefox download day and I’m sure it’s well over 3 million downloads at the time of this post. The Mozilla IRC channel was very active too, and I think their were web cams covering the event, because the chat seemed to be talking about us.

I also couldn’t help but think of how great a marketing strategy this and other parties are. You get 140 uber geeks together, give them some food and drinks and then have them all go home and talk about Firefox on their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is viral marketing at its best.

I hope to have some pictures of the party up soon, but I didn’t have a camera on me. Luckily, a friend of mine did! So I should have some soon. Oh, and if you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3 yet, what are you waiting for?