New technology becomes a commodity over time. That's just the way it works.
Someone comes out with a new feature, than everyone copies it, then it just becomes a standard. That's good for everyone, except the people who made businesses based on those new features (cough... Tivo... cough cough).
Mozilla's Project Coop may just be the beginning of "social" being built further down in the stack... a layer more deeply integrated into how we experience the web. If the web is the operating system, that sort of makes the browser part of the "hardware" to me... It's really exciting and something I'll be tracking more closely, b/c I certainly can't depend on all of those blogs and social networks to somehow come together on a single identity standard or FOAF-like format.