Mozilla Crowd Sources Customer Service Via Twitter

The Mozilla Project has launched the Army of Awesome customer service campaign. The initiative uses a basic Twitter search for the word "Firefox" to aggregate tweets into a list. Members of the Army of Awesome then pick a tweet that relates to a specific problem within Firefox and replies with advice or suggestions.

The Army of Awesome initiative is a good idea in theory, but because Mozilla can't refine their Twitter search to include only the tweets from people who actually need assistance. In the Army of Awesome's current state, the twitter feed contains mostly superfluous or observational tweets that aren't related to a service problem and in some cases are critical of Mozilla and the Firefox browser.

Here's a few choice ones:

@scott_wi: Finding myself using Internet Explorer 9 more than Firefox... hmmm...

@shireman: geeze Firefox, I'm not updating until IE Tab gets fixed. Get over it.

@Taemeny: waited all day long for my download to finish but firefox crashed. f--k you to. it was like 89% btw

@TeamHWilliams: Internet Explorer sucks, Firefox is better. But Google Chrome pwns them all!

@mjgraves: #Firefox, I like you...but you are a pig. A big, fat, bloated, pig! You can do better. YOu must do better, or we shall be parted #fb

@joerogel: Firing Firefox up these days is like waking a 3,000-year-old monster back up from the dead

The initiative is in its infancy and users are tweeting their technical difficulties. A possible solution to help weed out unrelated tweets might be assigning a specific hash tag to the project, so that people in need of help could tag pertinent tweets, putting them on the radar of an Army of Awesome member. In the meantime, it's a sharp idea that needs a little more work.