Reports have sprung up all over the blogosphere regarding a Firefox extension called Coop, which is being designed to add social features to the popular web browser.  The fact that this is an extension is really nice, because people that won’t use it won’t need to have it installed, while those that want it can have it. 

The Coop Firefox extension will let you track your friends pictures, movies, bookmarks, blog posts, and essentially anything else they feel like sharing with others.

As a result of this extension’s development, people have begun to wonder where exactly Flock will fit into all of this.   TechCrunch says that Flock is in trouble.  Shawn Hardin of Flock tends to disagree.  According to Shawn:

As we all know, online social activity and “the participatory web” are not fads, and Flock isn’t the only the company supporting these dynamic activities. We’re enthusiastic believers in the power of people, and in the Internet as a dynamic and interactive platform. Online behavior has changed dramatically over the last decade, but web browsers have changed only incrementally. We are building Flock for the hundreds of millions of people who want to do more than just look at the web. We want to give them a convenient, integrated, rich Internet experience.

Second, rapid prototyping and visualization is an important step in imagining new products and services, but the hard work is what follows. That hard work is all about making compelling new capabilities Dependable, Discoverable, Usable and Fun for average, active Internet users. This is what our teams are focused on company-wide, and we’re on target to deliver this experience in our 1.0 browser release later this year.

So what does this actually mean for Flock?  I’m not sure, I guess I’ll want to see the final Coop product before making comparisons, but I certainly hope there is room for both.   I use Flock quite a bit, and will a lot more once Flock 1.0 is released.Â