Mozilla
A Social Network in Firefox
Kicking IE7’s teeth even further down its throat, the Mozilla Foundation now seeks to incorporate social networking into Firefox. Enter The Coop:
Overview
The Coop is a Firefox addon in development that will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends. It will integrate with popular web services, using their existing data feeds as a transport mechanism.Users will see their friends’ faces, and by clicking on them will be able to get a list of that person’s recently added Flickr photos, favourite YouTube videos, tagged websites, composed blog posts, updated Facebook status, etc. If a user wants to share something with a friend, they simply drag that thing onto their friend’s face. When they receive something from a friend, that friend’s face glows to get the user’s attention.
Motivation
Perhaps the most common social interaction on the web today is sending someone a link. It’s done over IM, email, weblogs, RSS feeds from aggregator sites, bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us, social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, and even over the phone. The desire is the same: “hey, friend, go check out this neat thing and then let’s talk about it!”The goal of The Coop is to ease this interaction, and merge it with similar tools provided by a large number of popular web services.
Right now, I hate both MySpace and Friendster. The former is a walled garden; the latter is a glacier. I would much prefer an open, noncommercial social network seamlessly integrated into both my browsing experience and my friends’ Web services. The Coop sounds like just the ticket. Existing end-user Web services would do well to make sure they can show up in The Coop, at the very least with per-user RSS feeds.
Firefox 3: Gran Paradiso Alpha 1
Everything sounds cooler when you name it like a game. Firefox 3: Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 is out. The final version of Firefox 3 isn’t due until Fall 2007, so this is a really early sneak peek.
And to think Firefox 2 came out less than two months ago, enhanced security and all. That’s open source dev for you. By contrast, over five years passed between Internet Explorer 6 and 7 — and it still sucks. Bill Gates will retire before Microsoft gets IE right.
