Yesterday’s announcement is going to dramatically change the way we view, interact, and directly interface with the Internet. And not just on a literal level. If the Fire Fox browser and the past evolution of plug-ins is indicative of future development, companies like Me.dium based here in Boulder are facing a competitor with millions of embedded and highly engaged users. And to make a gross generalization, the type of people that use Fire Fox (geeks, technology forward, whatever you want to call us) are more likely to experiment and ultimately adopt wide scale usage of Coop and future social browsing plug-ins.
But the biggest news is Mozilla’s recognition that the way many people engage the web is driven by the crowds they associate with. Kudos to them for Coop. Many have written about RSS and information flow streams. I like this 2/19 entry from Emily Chang. A browser that enables a user to enter the data stream without drowning is a huge improvement. Add social filtering to that data stream and you have a real game changer. It’s not the semantic web, but it is a huge improvement to how browsing and discovery is done today by many users.
On to Rome!
