Mozilla is now testing yet another technology to try and help us all integrate the various messages we all generate everyday.
The new Raindrop effort comes from the Mozilla Messaging division as a way to help unify conversations.
“Raindrop uses a mini web server to fetch your conversations from
different sources (mail, twitter, RSS feeds), intelligently pulls out
the important parts, and allows you to interact with them using your
favorite modern web browser,” the Mozilla Labs Raindrop site states.
Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that Raindrop at this point is browser agnostic. That is, it is supposed to be able to work on Firefox, Safari or Chrome (sorry IE).
Kinda/sorta might maybe be similar to Google Wave in some ways. Mozilla Labs also has its Snowl effort which brings in conversations from multiple streams as well, though it isn’t tightly integrated with email — instead Snowl is a Firefox add-on.
“When a friend’s link from YouTube or flickr arrives, your messaging
client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of
the message, rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser
tab,”the Raindrop blog states. “Notifications from computers and mailing lists should be organized
for you, not clutter your Inbox or require tedious manual filter setup.
It should be easy to smoothly integrate new web services into your
conversation viewer entirely using open web technologies.”
Yes of course it’s a good idea, and that’s why others have tried and are continuing to try and do the same thing.
