Mozilla steals people bar from Flock

Mozilla Labs just announced the development of a new Firefox extension:

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.

Mozilla Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Keep track of your friends with The Coop

The project’s discussion page includes a number of mockups for the new design, including one lifted directly from Chris Messina’s mockup for a Flock people bar. While Chris is given credit, the Mozilla people have yet to mention anywhere the Flock browser that came up with the idea first, going so far as to edit Flock’s characteristic navigation bar out of Chris’s mockup.

Mozilla’s a good company - I’m shocked by this kind of intellectualy dishonesty.

At any rate, this could spell doom for the folks at Flock, who have yet to produce a 1.0 release and pushed back their implementation of the people bar two releases back. If they don’t come up with something sooner and better implemented, there will really be no use for Flock to all but the most diehard Youtube fans. While I love Flock and would be sorry to see it go, if Mozilla can come up with a better implementation I’ll certainly switch back to Firefox.

Also surprising is the fact that, two days later, there has still been no reaction from the Flock devs themselves. It will be interesting to see if they can come up with any response to this.

technorati tags:flock, mozilla, people, coop, web2.0, social

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