Mozilla's WebRTC Marries Video Calls and More with Firefox Browsing

Back in October, we covered Mozilla's intent to to includee a new Social API in the Firefox browser, designed to enable developers to integrate social services with browsing. Now, Mozilla has posted a demo of WebRTC, a new tool that enables web app developers to include real-time video calling and data sharing capabilities in their products.

You can watch a video demo of WebRTC here.  And, in the same post, Mozilla reports:

"While many of us are excited about WebRTC because it will enable several cool gaming applications and improve the performance and availability of video conferencing apps, WebRTC is proving to be a great tool for social apps.  Sometimes when you’re chatting with a friend, you just want to click on their name and see and talk with them in real-time.  Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos – or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in – simply by dragging the item into your video chat window."

In the video demo, Mozilla's Chief of Innovation, Todd Simpson, goes through some of these features.

Mozilla has a Developer Network page available with complete documentation on the new Social API. The company's Social API isn't the first time that anyone has attempted to marry social features with browsing. The Flock browser is famous for that. However, as the demo shows, some of the WebRTC functionality could introduce easy immediacy into social browsing and gaming. It definitely makes Mozilla's Social API effort that much more interesting to watch.