Chris Beard, Mozilla VP and General Manager for Mozilla Labs, the R&D arm of Mozilla, announced today that Mozilla could develop an open and extensible framework for online services that would allow users to access them from their favorite web browser, web aggregation service or web enabled desktop app (like Prism).

This framework would provide or standardize common basic building blocks such as communications protocols, encryption, data synchronization and identity management. Mozilla could even provide a set of basic services.

I am very excited to learn this, It sounds pretty much like what I’ve been waiting for. As I’ve said in the past, integrated with A, B, C and the kitchen sink approach taken by products like Flock and The Coop, a Mozilla Labs project, is not viable in the long term: social networks are trendy: your friends were yesterday on MySpace, today on Facebook and YouTube, tomorrow never knows.

The time you invest today tweaking your photo and video galleries, your online disk, bookmarks and everything else, there’s no guarantee they will be accessible tomorrow, for your friends, family or even yourself.

So there’s a need for an open framework that standardizes on how to query a web mail provider to know if you have new email or not, or even better a complete messaging system, a common way to upload and share photos, videos and other documents, a common identity system probably based on OpenID, a social bookmarking system, etc. At the same time, flexible enough so providers can find a way to difference among themselves and monetize on their specific implementations while raising the bar for the benefit of the consumer.

Mozilla has the necessary trust and proven commitment to web standards, advancing the web and providing the best experience to its users to lead such an effort.

According to Giga OM, a related Mozilla site at services.mozilla.com was available for a few hours. The site has been blocked afterwards and, as of this post, shows the message: New account registrations have been temporarily disabled.