Earlier this week, Mozilla Labs announced that they will be embedding social networking in the Mozilla browser (sucks for Flock but they must has seen that coming).
Enter “The Coop”, a Mozilla Labs project to experiment with adding social tools to the web browser. 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. There’s a project page that describes The Coop in a bit more detail, and also has some mockups of how it might look (my favorite is the idea for a view that shows a stream of recently shared material.)
Social Networking is truly becoming a commodity like the “shopping cart” did during the .com boom. Everyone and their uncle is coming out with something related with social networking. Today, TechCrunch posted that the Rolling Stones magazine would be creating a new social networking site. Start up’s are going to need more than just eye balls these days to attract some attention. I’m sure we’ll continue to see more established businesses rolling out social networking features to keep their users better engaged.