Mozilla to Bring the Social Network to the Browser

Remaining a hermit is going to be a lot harder as Mozilla has announced that it will be creating a social networking feature inside browsers such as Firefox.

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). - TechCrunch

With Myspace, blogs, Facebook, IM, email, cell phones, and SMS, yes it's nice to be able to keep in touch with our friends instantly and in a variety of ways, but do we really need them right there in our browser?