There’s a great article on ReadWriteWeb discussing how one of Facebook’s main rivals is, in fact the Mozilla Firefox browser. I’d recommend that you click the link to get the entire context of the article but it cites Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang’s  The Future of the Social Web report to summarize its main point:

“… in a bid to extend the reach of its new browser, Chrome, we expect Google to build OpenID and its associated friend connections into the browser; look for Firefox and eventually Internet Explorer to copy this feature. Facebook and MySpace will also likely build a way for users to surf the Web within the Facebook experience, retaining the social functionality. These connections won’t be perfect, but they’ll allow social networks to colonize communities and other parts of the Web, extending their experience out to other sites through the shared ID. As a result, in two years, portable identities will become a ubiquitous part of the online experience as they reach maturity.”

Interesting, no? Now, in the ongoing attempt to throw more ideas at the Newspaper Industry Survival (NIS) wall, I’m just going to put this out there – if Firefox or Internet Explorer web browsers will be able to help bridge social connections in their own communities, what’s stopping newspapers such as the Globe and Mail or The New York Times from doing the same?

OK, I know it’s a far-fetched idea and I know something similar has been attempted, like the TimesSelect application and whatever Garnett was doing in the 1980’s, but just imagine what a newspaper-branded web browser could do. Given that Firefox is an open-sourced software application and newspapers are, in a way, prehistoric social networking tools, it would be relatively easier to strip away non-vital parts and design it in a way that it would provide the best parts about what a newspaper is and build a community around that.

Take the New York Times, for example. First of all, your homepage would the the New York Times. All your bookmarks would be automatically linked to the Times’ site, your profile would automatically be logged into TimesPeople, third-party applications could be designed ala Firefox apps to help streamline Twitter messages (TwitterFox) or to create sidebars for news aggregators/RSS feeds, any website you visit would bring up a “recommended Times stories” list that would semantically point you back to the main page’s direction, etc. If you’re a user, you could get certain perks, like prioritized breaking news or lower subscirption rates.

The key, I think, would be to make sure a community can be formed, nutured and grown to interact with each other in a more direct or manner than you can today and do it seemlessly through your browser.

Again, I admit it’s not the strongest NIS idea out there … but for someone like me who is in a certain age/salary demographic, loves news(papers), is well-educated and is a heavy web user – well, I’d try out a NYT-branded web browser. Would you?