Firefox goes social
Posted by Jacque on April 5th, 2007
TechCrunch reports that Firefox is building social networking capabilities into its Web browser. Mozilla’s “The Coop” product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar.
Mozilla Labs notes that is surprising so little of this type of functionality has previously been included in web browsers. Enter “The Coop,” a Mozilla Labs project that will experiment with adding social tools to the web browser. “We want to create a fun and easy way to share links with your friends, and to browse the set of links that friends have shared with you. We also want to make it easy to “subscribe” to a friend in order to make it easy to keep track of the pictures, movies, blog posts and status information that they might be posting on a variety of services.” Currently there is a project page and a prototype available.
Adding a friend will mean getting access to a broad array of their published web content. Content will be pulled from that person’s Flickr photo feed, del.icio.us tag feed, MySpace status, YouTube favorites, etc. The Coop could also have an impact on social networks that depend on constant user page refreshes to maintain pageview growth. Having status information on your friends directly in the browser could significantly lessen the need to visit those sites directly.