Mozilla has released details on The Coop, a new product that will incorporate social networking features directly into the Firefox browser. This is not good news for the privately-backed social browser Flock (also built on Mozilla), which is yet to release a 1.0 version of its browser. Many of the proposed features and some of the mockups created by Mike Beltzner (see above) suggest a significant overlap in the two products.
In fact, Coop even has an example screen shot of Flock on the wiki page describing the product, along with the description “The design will likely resemble [formerly of Flock] Chris Messina’s mockup for “People in the Browser”, with a horizontal bar containing avatars for a user’s friends, and icons overlaid on those avatars to indicate the presence of new content.”
The Coop product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar. Those friends can share content and web pages with you (receive content from you, and send content to you).
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. When you want to share content with that user, you simply drag it into their avatar (see mockups below).
As Larry Dignan notes, 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.
The concept sounds great, but is Mozilla looking to compete for advertising dollars, create partnered distribution with other social networking sites, or are they trying to familiarize people with a more convenient outlet in an effort to create their own social network. So in essence, will they be competing with MySpace, Facebook, or are they just another distribution channel?
This is phenominally brilliant – what a huge, great geek community it will turn out to be
It is weird to have to compete with an entity with such powerful distribution distribution channels. Granted, they aren’t the dominant one, but from the talk pages of The Coop, beltzner writes:
http://wiki.moz...k:Labs/The_Coop
“we can’t be the first people to have thought of a service aggregator … but we have the advantage of being able to tie it in tightly with the browser itself”
Sound like MSFT? You bet.
Talk about bad news for IE6/7
I hope they offer a version without.
I want a browser, not a social network.
I don’t know about you but I don’t think I want my browser keeping a database of my personal info (profile). Period.
Agreeing with 5.
This looks enormously obnoxious. I will switch to IE if Mozilla makes this a standard part of new releases. Keep it an add-on and let the sociallly-over-networked use it and keep the rest of us happy.
Yep, I agree with 5,6, and 7. Its a neato concept, especially since there are too many social networks now (and its growing with people able to create their own within minutes)… but should “the browser” be this married to the social network craze? … and, is anyone else social-networked out?
Jason Alba
CEO – JibberJobber.com
I’d rather see them address the resource-hogging issues in Firefox. If social-networking features cause it to use any more system resources, I’ll need a freakin’ dedicated server just to browse the web.
It does sound exciting but why does Mozilla want to add further memory hogging features in firefox. A browser is supposed to help people surf the internet not manage their entire online persona. They should really offer a version without this functionality.
IMHO Flock was doomed from the start. The only way to be successful would be as an add-on and not as replacement of the whole browser. Mozilla/Firefox is a standard and you can’t easily replace or influcence that.
It’s about time someone built a social browser.
That Mike is using my design is no surprise — it’s been sitting in my Flickr acount for ages along with a bunch of other stuff that was never implemented — waiting for someone to come along and build it (that’s why it’s there — and that’ why I design for open source).
Though it might sound bad on the surface for Flock, I’m not sure it makes a difference, other than validating the original vision for Flock (which has yet to materialize) — and providing a much-needed kick in the ass to get them towards some coherent vision for what Flock should be. The Coop (creative name, there) will have the same problems that lead us down the path to creating a separate browser though — and that’s trying to graft on a fundamentally people-based experience into a primarily page-based experience.
But I welcome their efforts and do hope that it results in something good and that they’re able to learn from what progress Flock has made to date.
After all, it was long understood, at least in my mind, that Mozilla would be able to inherit from Flock’s existence; much the same as Flock did from the beginning. That’s how open source is supposed to work. And now that Mozilla Labs is thawing the pieces of the work that I put on ice when I left Flock, I think we’ll see some really good ideas come out of this.
As it is, they’ve got some of best guys at Mozilla working on this and I’ve spoken with all of them about what my vision for Flock was. At this point, I’d be thrilled if they built it.
Good on you Chris, right attitude. That said, I don’t want anything more in Firefox until they stop it consuming 98% of my CPU cycles. It’s a monster, put some effort into curing that problem so I don’t have to restart it every other day.
Have been waiting for Flock to go final and for Opera to start thinking about Social modules. The fact that Mozilla Labs implements sharing capabilities is great. If I can just drag my flickr photo album to a contact to share it, that does beat .Mac update mail.
When will any of these browsers enable people to talk? When can I click a phone number and get connected directly. I have seen some plug-ins/ad ons and they really suck. Of all social communication, I still believe the oral one to be superior.
If I could select and drag a piece of a page onto a buddy in the panel to immediately get connected voice/chat and know he sees the same as I. That would be something. Perhaps one wouldn’t have to send an image, but a CSS description and URL to highlight the selected part of a page.
FireFlocks ?
sorry
I am tired of this buddy buddy bullshit these open-source people keep tolerating. Personally i think it’s a gigantic fucking rip-off of flock’s entire existence, and if they don’t plan on buying flock or merging with flock then i don’t support this in the slightest.
I mean for the love of fucking god they called it THE COOP. I might as well just start up a new browser and call it FireFly and build it off of the mozilla platform, pretend to be a company, add two features, and then maybe i’d be an icon in the web 2.0 world.
Frankly, this idea was beyond retarded. With all due respect of course.
This is obviously good news for Firefox users.
I agree with #9. Firefox is still a resource hog. I’d rather see that fixed before it becomes a social browser.
Sick of the word ’social networking’ these days.
+1 on the performance issues. Firefox still has to get the basics down. Compared to WebKit-based browsers, it performs very poorly. I think the mozilla codebase is becoming a bit of a dog’s breakfast.
This is why I have been saying all along that building 100% off someone else is a recipe for (most likely) longterm failure.
Wow thats cool. I really love firefox.
Will the coop be Open Standards based? Will it use XFN, open Id etc. Last thing I want is another centralized social network.
I am quite curious to see if this picks up. Any one have any idea when a beta launch is predicted for (not just the sandbox)?
What’s the value add to me as the user to recreate my social network within my browser? I don’t get what this gives me that I don’t already have with something like Facebook. Could this play with the Facebook API so we’re not completely recreating the wheel?
It is a dumbass idea..I don’t know why #1 and #2 thinks it is a gr8 idea..
I use Flock, because Firefox is now too big and slow. If they add social networking (which in Flock amounts to posting your blog and your photos to Flickr and some other blogging software), won’t it make Firefox bigger and slower?
Interesting… However, with everything available on the web, why do people need to manually rebuild their social network? Just by looking at someones blog, I can see who their friends are, what their interests are, etc..
Just aggregate that content and throw it into a database and voila – instant social network, instant social search; if I need a recommendation for music – search my network… If I want to buy something from eBay – search my network.
It only makes sense that we should be moving towards more algorithmic means for identifying relationships.
What’s wrong with StumbleUpon? Why would I want my already resource hogging browser to also keep tabs on me remotely?
Yeah adding anything (that is not optional) could kill Firefox ..
– If I dont have the option to leave this thing out .. (for the sake of ram)
– I would defintly probably go to Opera
Thank you very much, TC moderators, for deleting the comment I posted last night.
I really agree with you francine. the first argument to firefox is his performace over IE. I don’t think i will use this feature
Mike you might want to add an additional para on startup advice
“Not to build solely on others technology”.
Now we have seen 2 examples of this in a short time span. First Alexa shutting the doors on Statsaholic and now Mozilla decided to have an in house version of Flock.
Link to statsaholic coverage on techcrunch is here
http://www.tech...olic/trackback/
Nice match for Mugshot, a complimentary open source community effort… 1 + 1 = 3?
I like the idea. It would be nice if it was another browser kind of like flock, but with an On Off option. I wouldn’t care to use The Coop, as long as I was able to turn it off, when i didn’t want it on. Also I would want to option to not have it at all. Firefox != The Coop but The Coop == Firefox
Minggl does all of this today IE & FF (PC & Mac) and much more
http://www.minggl.com
Josh (#16):
Have you even *used* Flock? It’s Firefox with extensions and a skin, except it’s just already built in. I don’t see Mozilla as ripping Flock’s existence, but adding a feature that they see is needed. This isn’t Highlander, it’s business and “There can be only one” just doesn’t apply.
Firefox still has a lot of market share to gain, if this helps it, then that’s great.
Besides, Flock was bad news for Flock. It’s self-expected genius hampered by mediocrity.
“Besides, Flock was bad news for Flock. It’s self-expected genius hampered by mediocrity.”
the reason this pisses me off is that the guy that came up with the “idea” for Mozilla is actually a former Flock employee… that’s why the screenshots even show Flock being used and not Firefox… This isn’t a competing idea, this is a stolen idea. Let’s also clear this up: Mozilla is a corporation and Flock is a corporation. They’re both for-profit entities.
IMO, that’s pathetic. Mozilla should be concentrating on making a better rendering engine, not feature enhancements like this, or a competitor for Apollo… get your fucking act together, Mozilla. Firefox is turning to shit with these memory leaks and all they can do is steal ideas from other companies!
My only question is, is it pronounced “co – op” or “koop” ?
this is what extensions are for. i want my browser to be a browser, and any other functionality should be added on as i need it.
if i wanted a browser that was full of other crap, i would be using opera or flock
@ #40
That’s exactly what I said… they’re losing focus…
I think this is a great idea, and I hope they make it non-optional. People that really hate it can use another browser, but forcing people who use the latest version of Firefox to have social networking built in will maximize the size of the network.
BTW, I have 14 Firefox windows open, some with multiple tabs. I don’t notice any performance impact on my XP box. What kind of boxes are getting bogged down by Firefox?
Firefox started as an alternative to the slow, bloated, feature-crazy Mozilla. Now we need an alternative to the slow, bloated, feature-crazy Firefox.
They’re after Myspace users for this not geeks.
My first reaction upon reading the post was that this is a great idea. But after reading other’s comments, I agree that The Coop should be optional if offered in the next Firefox release.
I would use it, but I want it to be separate from my browser, maybe as part of a suite of software. i.e. you could download the Firefox suite consisting of Firefox, Thunderbird, and The Coop. All-in-one software (or even hardware) never seems to cut it. As #40 said, a browser should be a browser.
But it’s okay, Flock. Sometimes seemingly great ideas just don’t turn out as intended or aren’t highly embraced as expected. I liked the idea of Flock so I downloaded it. But I never use it. I use plain old Firefox instead. I don’t know why. I just do.
Good for Firefox! Flock is taken too damn long to be release they been talking smack for two years.
So if they are mad cause Firefox is going one up them then screw it. You could give Flock a $1 billion and they still will not release a browser!
Flock is dead!
this is ridiculous, this will signal the end of firefox, what a waste of resources. This is a plugin at best…and should be kept out of the core browser. this is the end of a focused browser…
agreed:
@ #40
That’s exactly what I said… they’re losing focus…
What’s a ’social’ and why would I want to network with it?
@Jimmy: do you understand “low barriers to entry” now? how about now?
24 yo CEOs…yep, bubble 2.0 exploding…now.
Well,
I haven’t completely made up my mind on this issue. I believe it will definitely be an enhancement to the social networking world. Sometimes I fill as if I am just plum sick of all this social network crap though. On the other hand I love some social networks. I don’t believe I could live without MySpace because it has helped me find a lot of childhood friends and missing family. What I try to do is be centralized. Just join up with two or three networks and if my friends really want to be ’social’ with me, then they will join the network I am on. If they don’t like it they just have to hack it. After all, this is ‘MYspace’ not ‘myFRIENDSspace.’ Take it from the name…stay in your own little ’space.’ IMHO…if friends are really true friends, then they will want to come where you are. What I am basically saying is….be the leader of your own life. Don’t let others lead you around by the nose. Now that’s hard for some people but ‘leadership’ is my type of personality.
I seem to lean toward the opinion that FireFox needs to fix the memory issues before they go to adding a lot of stuff to it. Like some said, I don’t want this ‘Coop’ thing to be mandantory. Now I don’t mind if they have all the little options installed on the options box and maybe a checkbox that says ‘Enable The Coop.’ Notice that I said ‘LITTLE,’ that means….everywhere that you turn and look it doesn’t need to say ‘enter your MySpace ID,’ or ‘Sign up for The Coop.’
I say keep it in a nice centralized place and add the ability for users to turn in on and off. Most of all, DO NOT ‘COOP’ us up with monetizing ads!!!! We do not want to be little clickin’ chickens….so stay away from the idea of heavy monetizing!!!!!!
Jason