[citation needed] The Firefly website was created by Firefly Network, Inc.(originally known as Agents Inc.)[1] The company was founded in March 1995 by a group of engineers from MIT Media Lab and some business people from Harvard Business School, including Pattie Maes (Media Lab professor), Upendra Shardanand, Nick Grouf, Max Metral, David Waxman and Yezdi Lashkari.
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.
[7] Since Firefly was amassing large amounts of profile data from its users, privacy became a big concern of the company.
They also were key contributors to OPS (Open Profiling Standard), a recommendation to the W3C (along with Netscape and VeriSign) to what eventually became known as the P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences).
Later redesigns reflected the company's push towards corporate customers and desire to de-emphasize the Firefly community website.