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Mozilla labs has released some details about project Coop, an attempt to transform the browser into a social network. The product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser along with avatar representation, display them in the sidebar, share and send content and webpages.

Adding friends will also enable you to share and view a wide range of web´s exciting content with friends including Flickr photo feed, del.icio.us tag feed, MySpace profile, Youtube Favorites and what not. Sharing content is a breeze, all you need to do is drag it from the webpage and drop it on the avatar of the person.

The release of Coop will be a killer blow to Flock, a privately backed social browser that is being built on top of Mozilla code base. Flock aims to do exactly what Mozilla has just announced, in fact their is such an overlap of features that the Mozilla team decided to put the snapshot of Flock in their wiki page as an example. Above all it teaches us that building upon others technology is just like building castles on sand. We have now seen this numerous times, first Alexa shutting doors to Statsaholic and now Mozilla decided to build an in house version of Flock.

Another impact of the browser would be on the social networks that rely on the generation of massive page views by users while they are browsing each others profiles. The status information on your friends in the browser sidebar will remove the need to view the profiles on the social networks itself.

Mozilla is now really turning out to be a competitive force, they now have many exciting projects including

• Project Minimo: a mobile web browser
• Project Joey: a server, firefox add on and java midlet that lets you pass data from Firefox to your mobile phone.
• Project Operator, an effort to combine pieces of information on website applications meaningfully for example Upcoming + Google Calendar, Yahoo Local + Your address book.