Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management. The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation? Accuse us of punning, but definitely sign us up. Google Chrome: Start taking notes. Sponsor Our friends at Mozilla posted this teaser back in the spring, when they touted a way to eliminate clicks and keystrokes between navigating to and being recognized by a given website. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick enthused, "Earlier this week, we argued that browsers and social networks were fast converging, and that with more users and some feature advantages, Firefox could be the best real competition for Facebook... This is just one more chapter in a much larger story - but look how easy this makes OpenID to use!" But now, Mozilla's UX chief Aza Raskin has posted more updates to his personal blog that indicate new hotness is coming soon. The new feature will harness the power of Mozilla's Weave to make your online identity something that's stored in your back pocket more than it's stored in your cookies or a third party's server. Decrying redirects and iframes , Raskin tells of a brave new world where an in-browser button that defies navigational difficulties allows for something closer to true identity portability than we've seen yet: Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for "sign in" on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site... Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Finally! They said it! And now, we give you screenshots: So, what's the verdict, readers? Does this surpass Chrome's identity-porting capabilities? Does this create massive privacy issues for users who don't want their personal traffic tracked? Discuss

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Firefox's Plan to Kick the Login's Butt

Earlier this spring, Twitter announced it would soon be adding location-based information to tweets . Typical of what we like to think of as the company's "mysterious charm," the feature has been unveiled six months later with a brief post on the Twitter blog. The new geotagging capabilities can already be seen in certain third-party apps and might even come to the web interface sometime soon. Sponsor To activate the new hotness, Twitter users must go to their Settings pages and click "Enable Geotagging." For obvious privacy reasons, the feature is not automatically enabled. Apps such as Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro, and many others are already supporting location-based data for tweets. "The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations," writes Twitter platform/API man Ryan Sarver in the blog post. "Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community." As are we! But we might hold out on enabling the geo-tastic feature just yet. We've still got a few stalkers to shake, and we're waiting for the inevitable bugs to surface before we trust our favorite microblog with our favorite haunts, too. Discuss

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Twitter API Gets Geotagging; Web Geotagging Coming Soon?