Mozilla, maker of Firefox, everyone’s favorite web browser (what, you’re still using IE7?), has annouced Coop, which incorporates social networking right in the Firefox browser.
According to Tech Crunch:

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.

No need to visit Myspace every 5 minutes, get Twitter-like update on your friends. P2P filesharing built into the browser.

This will be bad news for social nets relying on massive numbers of pageviews for advertising dollars and even worse for users of the Flock social browser.

An initial misgiving of mine is that Firefox on older Macs is a total resource hog, they have a lot of things that need to be cleaned up in the browser, hopefully this won’t slow my machine down to Google Earth lethargy levels.

Announcement at Mozilla Labs and the Coop Wiki.