Firefox goes social with The Coop

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 05 April 2007 13:29

Business IT - Technology

A Mozilla Labs project aims to drive social networking features into the Firefox web browser.

Work is underway on The Coop, an add-on for Firefox that will tap the social aspects of popular web services such as photo sharing, blogging, and tagging, as well as sharing the user's activity with their friends.

"[M]ost 'Web 2.0' services have a feature that makes it easy for you to build a social network so that you can share things more easily, or subscribe to a friend’s activity as a way of keeping in touch," says the Mozilla Labs Blog.

"What is surprising, however, is how little of this type of functionality has made it into today's web browsers. The result is that when people think of tools for social interaction, email and instant messenger are at the top of their list, not web browsers."

The Coop aims to fill this gap, with proposed support for services such as Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace.

"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," says the blog.

The name is presumably a play on 'fox in the chicken coop" plus coop as an abbreviation of co-operation. Current plans envision representing each of the user's friends with avatars shown in an array of boxes, much like hens in a coop. These avatars would glow to indicate new content was available.

The Coop could set Firefox apart from Internet Explorer once again - IE7 delivered most of the features users liked in Firefox but were absent from IE6. It would not be surprising if Microsoft, Apple and other browser developers quickly begin to shadow the project's progress.

The project treads on the toes of Flock, an existing project to build a social browser on top of the Mozilla code base.