Earlier this week Mozilla unveiled an experimental social networking add-on for Firefox called [The Coop][1]. A limited proof-of-concept add-on can be [downloaded from the Firefox Add-ons site][5] (note that the link seems to have been taken down) but currently requires a Facebook account to be useful.

For some background on The Coop check out our [earlier coverage][3]. To get a better idea of where Mozilla plans to go with The Coop, I spoke with Chris Beard, Mozilla's Vice President of products, yesterday (transcript after the jump).


**Wired News**: What made Mozilla want to get involved in the social networking trend?

**Chris Beard**: We get most of our ideas from the community. We looked at what people were doing on the web... two years ago searching was the dominate task, so with Firefox 1.0 we added the search box in the toolbar and of course made it possible to use different search engines. Looking at the web today, tons of people are working with social networks so we decided to see how the social networking experience might fit in the browser. 


**WN**: There is obviously some overlap between [Flock][2] and The Coop, was Flock an inspiration?

**CB**: Flock is certainly developing a browser for social networks, but this is not a reaction to Flock. 

Our project is of course open source. [Mozilla Labs] is really about being open and collaborative and encouraging wide levels of participation from the community. 

At Mozilla Labs anyone is welcome to participate. We provide forms for public feedback and discussion. 

**WN**: So The Coop is not involved with Flock?

Flock has not contributed to this project in anyway, no.

**WN**: Is this something that will make its way into Firefox 3?

**CB**: AT this point there are no specific features planned for Firefox 3. There's still room for features, but nothing definite at this point.

This is just one of the projects under the Mozilla Labs umbrella, but we don't know where this, or any of the others, are going yet. 


**WN**: Some of our readers have expressed concern that rolling this into the browser would lead to feature bloat and sluggish performance, do you think this will end up as part of the browser itself or stay separate as an add-on?

**CB**: We put together this initial prototype very quickly, it only took us a couple of weeks. So we really haven't even thought about where this thing goes from here. 

But we definitely want to make sure that the interface of Firefox remains clean and focused on browsing. We don't want to get in some kind of feature war -- that never helps the browser or the user. 

We want to get some debate and discussion about the possibilities and see where that leads. 


If you'd like to contribute your opinions and ideas, head over to the [Mozilla Labs forum][4] and join in the discussion.

[1]: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/04/keep-track-of-your-friends-with-the-coop/ "Mozilla Labs: The Coop"
[2]: http://www.flock.com/ "Flock"
[3]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/04/mozilla_propose.html "Mozilla Proposes Social Networking Features For Firefox"
[4]: https://labs.mozilla.com/forum/index.php/board,8.0.html "Mozilla Labs Forum: The Coop"
[5]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4746 "The Coop"