Mozilla flys The Coop, adds social network functions to Firefox

Mozilla is currently working on a Firefox add-on, The Coop, which will allow users to monitor their friends online, and share interesting content with them. The add-on will integrate with popular social networking sites like Flickr and YouTube.

After a user’s ’friends list’ is set-up, you’ll be shown your list of friends and their pictures. A simple click of the mouse on any friend will reveal their recently added Flicr photos, favorite YouTube videos, tagged websites, Facebook status, and most recent blog posts.

Sharing content with friends could not get any easier; simply dragging an object onto a friend’s picture will alert them with the shared content. The friend’s face will glow as a visual clue until they have accessed the content that you’ve shared.

Mozilla took note that the majority of friend-to-friend activity on the web consisted of sharing links; this was their primary motivation for The Coop, which was specifically designed to ease this interaction.

The Coop will initially be a ‘barebone’ version of what will be available in the short future, giving users the tools to provide login information for websites, adding friends, and discovering and setting up information on their Flicr, de.ici.ous, YouTube, Facebook, Blog, and other accounts.

A method to send information to groups of friends will be available in version 2, and will also have extensibility for adding arbitrary services to The Coop.

The user interface will have boxes, similar to a real chicken coop, that will be where each of a user’s friends ‘live.’ Icons in each box will indicate that a friend has new or recent content that can be viewed with a simple click of the mouse; version 2 will allow a preview of the content by hovering the mouse over the friend’s image.

Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of this add-on is the fact that it’s not a new service; you don’t have to feed it information or upload content to it. It’s not another social networking site; it simply offers a convenient way to integrate the most popular web services.