Webware

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For almost all of its existence, Mozilla Messaging has been known for Thunderbird--e-mail software with the traditional view that a person's PC is the center of their computing existence.

Now, though, the Mozilla Foundation subsidiary's scope is expanding beyond the confines of the computer under your desk or on your lap. In the near term, the new Thunderbird 3 is becoming more integrated with the Web. And in the longer term, the Raindrop project has the potential to lift your inbox all the way to the cloud.

"For us it's really important to have Thunderbird. It's also important to not stay in the blinders of that scenario," Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher said in an interview at the company's headquarters here. With Raindrop, "We're focusing on best experience for messaging in a Web application."

Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The change reflects the changing nature of computing. Where Thunderbird's chief competition once was now software such as Microsoft's Outlook, it's now also got to reckon with Google's Web-based Gmail service and its ilk, Ascher said.

Thunderbird is still a priority. Thunderbird 3 is set to arrive next week in near-final form--though nearly a year later than had been planned--but Mozilla Messaging has high hopes the new version will be faster, easier to use, and more versatile through the addition of third-party extensions.

Universal inbox
Raindrop is something of an ultimate inbox in the company's vision, a Web application that draws not just from e-mail but from other communication conduits such as Twitter, Facebook mail, and instant messaging. Its goal isn't just to consolidate today's overabundance of communications channels, it's to help prioritize what's important and put off what's optional until a more convenient time.

"We're breaking the notion of one list coming in, in chronological order," he said. What just arrived isn't necessarily the most important thing to do, though human minds are prone to thinking it is.

Some aspects of Raindrop's future are more certain than others. It's way to early to say when the company might release its first version of the actual software, but one thing that's settled is that Raindrop won't be a service Mozilla offers. Instead, the software will run on others' servers--at Internet service providers, for example.

"Hosting a messaging system for the world is not something we can afford right now," Ascher said. Still, it's revealing that the company chose to create Raindrop as a server-based technology accessible through a Web browser rather than as PC-based software.

Will Raindrop rule the roost?
In the longer term--say 2015--might Raindrop replace Thunderbird as people's messaging interface of choice? Perhaps.

"I suspect some people will and some people won't," he said. "I think desktop software still has a bunch of user benefits that will last for quite awhile."

Persuading everybody to freely cooperate with Raindrop could be tough. Sites like Facebook like their central positions in people's electronic lives and like to serve ads next to their content. In time, though, Ascher believes they'll come aboard.

"I think in the long term, openness wins," he said.

Even without Raindrop, Thunderbird 3 will integrate with the Web. It's got Firefox's engine built in for displaying Web pages, a fact that means the software can display Web content.

That ability means Thunderbird can, for example, show Yahoo and Google calendars in separate tabs. There's little in the way of integration with those services today, but it can be added, Ascher said. He expects plenty more add-ons will bring it closer to the cloud, too. He didn't mention it, but even Raindrop could be added in its own compartment.

Mozilla Messaging smells money
Mozilla Messaging is part of a peculiar organizational structure. In the beginning the non-profit Mozilla Foundation oversaw the open-source software that was the core of Netscape Communicator. Eventually, that software split into two main components: the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird e-mail software.

The foundation set up two subsidiaries to oversee the two projects, first Mozilla Corp. for Firefox in 2005 and second Mozilla Messaging for Thunderbird in 2007. Ascher has since 2007 led the latter, which employs six engineers and nine others.

It also draws on the expertise of many volunteers in the open-source world who translate the software, write add-ons, and help debug it. Because of this help, Mozilla Messaging gets by with only one quality assurance employee and one marketing employee, and Thunderbird 3 will arrive in more than 40 languages.

The subsidiary today gets its funding from its nonprofit Mozilla Foundation parent, which in turn receives the lion's share of revenue from search advertising revenue that results from searches Firefox sends Google's way. Ultimately, Ascher wants Mozilla Messaging to be financially self-sustaining. But how?

"I'm not sure yet. I think what we're looking for are rev models like Firefox--revenue models where the user benefits and doesn't have to pay anything, and somehow enough money flows into Mozilla Messaging to fund development long-term," Ascher said.

That may sound like a lot of hand-waving, but Ascher points out he has no investors looking for a big and quick return on the money they invested, so Mozilla Messaging is a relatively cheap operation to run.

Ads? No thanks
One route the company won't take is advertising, the approach that's vital to Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, as well as to Firefox.

"I don't think people benefit from advertising in mail," he said. "One reason it works for search engines is people often are searching to buy. They're happy to see ads. It helps them. I don't think that works in e-mail."

Today, there are probably somewhere between 10 million and 20 million Thunderbird users, said Rafael Ebron, Mozilla Messaging's director of marketing. That's a far cry from Firefox, whose users total more than 300 million, Mozilla says.

But both projects can punch above their weight. Just being a freely available alternative--whether with Thunderbird or with Raindrop--can steer other products and services, Ascher believes.

"Firefox had an influence over people greater than its market share," Ascher said. "I don't think we'd need to manage everybody's e-mail servers for us to have an influence over the e-mail landscape and make sure everybody has a better experience."

Trillain 4.1 beta for Windows amps Twitter and Facebook power.

(Credit: Cerulean Studios)

Makers of the multinetwork chat application Trillian threw open doors to the company's latest beta, previously available onto to private beta testers, allowing any Windows user to test Trillian 4.1 beta before the code becomes final.

Chief among the changes in the beta are new social networking features and tight integration with Windows 7 for users of Microsoft's most recent operating system. Trillian 4.1 beta supports story links and avatar pictures in more locations on the interface, as well as Twitter hash tags and direct (@) replies. You can now also tweet from the contact list, follow and unfollow users, and edit a message before you retweet. Here's the full list of changes for Twitter and Facebook users.

Although the current stable version, Trillian Astra 4.0, works fine in Windows 7, the beta brings on optimizations, like support for jump lists, and an animated progress bar that displays during file transfers (see all new features).

Trillian 4.1 beta for Windows also gets an overhaul in the e-mail notifications department, with six additional features that span new views in which to organize your messages, to new things you can do with notification messages, like toggling through alerts and shoving them into any corner of the screen. The ability to manage incoming messages from the right-click context menu looks especially convenient.

Read more about Trillian 4.1 beta's e-mail enhancements, and a few extra tweaks to status control. Beta users should be forewarned that since 4.1 is still in the development process, you may run across some bugs and instability.

Trillian faces heavy competition from all-in-one chat clients like Digsby, which also incorporates Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail notifications into its communications application. Giving Trillian greater social networking capabilities will help keep Cerulean Studios' instant messenger competitive.

Typing on the iPhone/iPod Touch's keyboard can be arduous. This is never more evident than when trying to bang out messages in several instant-messaging conversations at once. Shape Services, the makers of the popular IM+ instant-messaging app ($9.99 App Store link), have realized this, and are soon rolling out a new version of the app that includes speech-to-text, albeit at a price.

Taking advantage of Apple's recently released in-app payment system, 99 cents a month gets you the feature, meaning that the annual cost of continuing to use it is about $12 a year. Not bad if you're a heavy user. But how well does it work?

In short, it does a decent job, but it still experiences some of the typical pitfalls found in other speech-to-text tools. If you've used Google's search app on the iPhone you know all too well that it can handle some words better than others, and that it works slightly faster when you're on Wi-Fi. The same can be said of IM+.

The app managed to get a few sentences without flaws, but I regularly found myself going into make a quick edit to one or two words each time. That wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take so long to do all the processing. Over 3G, small quips like a four- or five-word reply took around 15 seconds to process and get sent back, whereas full messages took up to 24 seconds. These times were cut a few seconds shorter when on a solid Wi-Fi connection, but still on the long side.

The updated version of the app is in Apple's review queue, meaning it could be out later this week, month, or be rejected outright (although not likely since it's using standard APIs). Besides speech-to-text, the update also adds animated emoticons for whatever service you're using. It's a small touch, but sure to make IM enthusiasts happy. We take a quick look at that and the speech-to-text feature in the video below. Worth noting is that processing times have been sped up for the sake of time, although we make note of that when it occurs:

Yahoo Messenger 10 beta--screenshots

It seems as if it were just yesterday that Yahoo's Messenger team rolled out version 9 (it was a little less than a year ago, in fact.) The upgrade was so dramatic and overdue that it's a little surprising Yahoo has already tweaked its chat client, now parading Yahoo Messenger 10 beta to testers and curious chatters. We're glad they did. Even though the changes may not please everyone uniformly, nor should they incite ire. The features build off Yahoo Messenger 9, emphasize social networking, and improved video calling.

You'll be able to learn more about the social networking aspects from the photo gallery. This blog will focus on the video features.

VoIP and PC-to-landline calls aren't new to Yahoo Messenger, but the icon that calls out video chats is. Most of the major IM clients support voice-over-Internet calls with Webcams. It is Yahoo's attention to video quality makes this build a closer competitor to Skype for Windows, which is a VoIP client first, enriched by chatting, file sharing, emoticons, and games. Yahoo Messenger (and Windows Live Messenger, and so on, for that matter,) are chat apps at the core that have layered on other P2P features.

Skype is still ahead in terms of total features, like screen sharing, its most recent contribution to the VoIP community. However, the Web chatting experience was good enough on Yahoo Messenger 10 beta in our tests that we might prefer to use it to start a casual video call if the app is already running, rather than fire up Skype. Admittedly, our tests were limited by the callers' proximity to each other, fast data connections, and strong computing configurations. We'll need to keep up the calling with a cross-section of international users to get a more accurate litmus. Since the improved video calling only works with other Yahoo Messenger 10 beta users, we may have to wait for further adoption to test these theories.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Proximity notwithstanding, there were some performance issues. The call quality was clear and the videos were as crisp as our hardware allowed. Chatting and file sharing, however, slowed to a crawl as the call progressed. This seems to be the reverse of Skype, in which chatting has, in the past, often transmitted faster than the voice packets. Again, being in the same city, let alone the same country, could at least partly explain the reversal.

In addition to both parties needing Yahoo Messenger 10 beta on their Windows computers, there are some basic system requirements. You'll need Windows XP or better with a 1GHz CPU processor and 512MB of RAM. Your broadband internet will require a minimum of 300Kbps download speed and a minimum of 128Kbps upload (test both here). Then there's the video card. You'll need at least 96MB memory. A Webcam is mandatory to output video calls, but not to see a buddy's video. However, you will receive an alert if you don't have a Webcam. The final ingredient we'll mention is that the latest version of Microsoft DirectX must be installed. Yahoo provides a full list of specs and tips in its help topics. Yahoo's Messenger team provides some common FAQs and video tips here

Briefly, some of the other video features include toggling the sound on and off and shifting the position of the Webcam windows on your screen. These convenience tools worked well and gave the application some depth; we also liked being able to transfer files in full screen mode, even though photo transfers were slow.

This bug reminders us that beta software is often a work-in-progress.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

One more complaint: The new Yahoo Messenger 10 beta doesn't appear to play nicely with all third-party IM clients. We noticed when chatting with a buddy who uses Digsby, that each line we type was replicated in the chat window. Odd, yes, and also irritating over time. But not all users chatting between Yahoo Messenger 10 beta and a different chat client will encounter problems, but if you do, let us know.

Want to see more screenshots and feature details? We have plenty in the Yahoo Messenger 10 beta gallery. .

Yahoo has begun bringing its BrowserPlus technology to a broader audience, making installation of the browser-boosting plug-in a default part of installing the beta of the new Yahoo Messenger 10 that emerged this week.

BrowserPlus gives Web sites some better abilities taken for granted in applications that run natively on a computer, and because it's a framework, new abilities can be added later. Among the current features are the ability to drag files from the desktop to the browser, to read accelerometer data to judge a computer's orientation, to edit images, and to upload many files at once.

BrowserPlus is installed by default during the installation of the Yahoo Messenger 10 beta. Those who don't want it can deselect it through the custom installation path.

Yahoo announced BrowserPlus in May 2008, then upgraded it and made it open-source software in November.

BrowserPlus is one of many extras that can be disabled in the custom section of the Yahoo Messenger 10 beta installation.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Adobe Systems' Flash Player plug-in is widely installed, but plug-ins in general are hard to propagate enough that Web site programmers can safely assume they can be used. One way to tackle the issue is to piggyback on the distribution of other, popular software--a technique long employed to encourage adoption of browser toolbars.

Many companies are working hard on the "Open Web," in which advanced abilities are built directly into Web standards such as HTML 5. However, plug-ins such as Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, BrowserPlus, and Google's Gears can advance the state of the art faster.

Update 4:55 p.m. PDT: Yahoo said it does in fact plan to include BrowserPlus in the final version of Yahoo Messenger. Also, it shared this list of the browsers and operating systems the plug-in supports:

• Windows XP: supports Firefox 2 or newer, Safari, IE6 or newer, and Google Chrome

• Windows Vista: supports Firefox 3 or newer, Safari, IE6 or newer, and Google Chrome

• Windows 7: Same as Windows Vista, in experimental status

• Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5: Recent versions of Safari and Firefox 3 or newer

• Mac OS X 10.6: Firefox 3 or better (Safari support in the works)

Updated 1:58 p.m. PDT to correct the initial release date of BrowserPlus.

Pidgin has introduced a major update with version 2.6.0, and the current bug-fixing 2.6.1, and along with more than 100 fixes between the two comes support for Google Voice and Google Talk. If you're on Windows, though, this won't mean much--the protocol currently only works with XMPP at the moment, not the derivative protocol that Google uses. Pidgin Portable 2.6.1 is also available for USB keys.

Other changes include splitting the Yahoo protocols into two, one for Yahoo Japan, and one for the rest of the world. Both protocols in Pidgin now support SMS numbers. MSN account users now can receive voice clips and handwritten notes, and there was a major security fix for MSN pushed in version 2.5.9.

The full list of changes can be read here.

Eric Woodward, creator of the short URL service Tr.im, painted his product into a corner when he announced first, that he was going to take it offline, and then a few days later that he wasn't. Nobody wants to trust their Web links to a capricious business that could go offline again, and take working links and traffic with it.

On August 17, Woodward put a fresh coat on the prior week's drama with a new gambit: He said he was giving the service to the community. In the bitter post announcing this plan, he continued to claim that due to the fact that Twitter made Bit.ly the default URL shortener for the service, a product like Tr.im has no real chance for success. Related, he says, is the recent announcement of the 301works archive for short URLs, which he sees as a craven publicity stunt to boost Bit.ly, since the same people behind it are also running 301works.

Woodward says that the Internet needs an open link-shortening service, because the traffic data short URLs generates is too valuable to entrust to a single company. "You can't get the aggregate data on what's being shared in real time by everyone," he told me. "Twitter wants to become a real-time search engine, so the data Bit.ly is capturing is very valuable."

(Bit.ly data is currently wide open, at least on an individual URL basis. Simply append "+" to a Bit.ly link to get traffic stats on it. Woodward wants to see a "fire hose" of short URL data, however.)

A Twitter keiretsu?
Woodward does have reason to be envious and even suspicious of the Bit.ly-Twitter relationship, although it's difficult to draw the connection all the way to malfeasance on the part of the two companies. And it's hard to believe that his strident posturing will win him much support outside of a small group of the most zealous open-source boosters.

Several powerful companies in the Twitter ecosystem are inter-related. Bit.ly's CEO is John Borthwick, and Borthwick is also CEO of Betaworks. Betaworks helps build companies in the social-messaging space. It incubated Summize, the Twitter search engine Twitter acquired last year, and through that deal Betaworks remains connected to Twitter. Betaworks has also worked with Tweetdeck -- which also uses Bit.ly as the default link shortener. The company has several other Twitter (and Facebook) projects running right now. Suffice it to say that if you're in Betaworks' network, you've got great access to Twitter. If you're competing with a Betaworks portfolio company to get Twitter's attention, you've got a tough road ahead.

Betaworks is one of the drivers of the 301works short URL data project, and it's the relationship between Bit.ly and 301works that led Woodward to shun the project, at least for now. "There's nothing wrong with it in theory, but it doesn't solve the link rot problem," Woodward said. He added, "Why would I give them the publicity?"

Trillian Astra has finally, officially replaced Trillian 3. Users who experienced the Astra beta will find the final version to be similar, with the biggest change being the features that are limited to the paid Pro version. If you're new to Trillian Astra, this update makes the multi-protocol chat client competitive again.

This screenshot of the Astra beta looks identical to the final version of the program.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The differences between the two versions are enumerated here; the short of it is that the extras are nice--but they're merely extras. You'll still get the improved performance, and support for mainstream services like Yahoo, AOL, Google, and ICQ. MySpaceIM is supported, and Skype is included, but it requires the program to be running before it can be accessed through Astra--just as Skype does with other multichat applications. It includes POP3 and IMAP account notifications rolled in alongside the Facebook and Web mail notices.

Perhaps most importantly, the Cerulean Studios team promises that Trillian Astra will be updated more frequently than Trillian 3 ever was, with regular maintenance patches.

Editor's note: There is a bug currently on the Download.com product page that indicates that the program is only available to buy. This is being worked on and should be fixed Monday. The program can be downloaded for free.

A new skin preps you for Digsby on Windows 7.

(Credit: Digsby)

On Wednesday, Digsby released a new version of the Digsby all-in-one instant messenger to all users.

Digsby 61 is a medium-size update that concentrates on bulking up Digsby's interaction with social networks. The first addition is a new dialog box that hooks into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace so that any status message set in Digsby can also broadcast to the others. Called the Global Status dialog, it folds in a URL shortener that makes it easier to share links in your status update. The link-shortener hasn't crossed over into the instant message windows; it's current realm is the status message only.

When you send a link, Digsby utilizes the same virtual toolbar metaphor that got some Digg users up in arms. But here's a tip: to send a straightforward link that ducks the Digsby "toolbar," add a dash (-) to the end of the URL.

You're also able to share pictures in the Global Status box thanks to integration with pic.im.

A significantly expanded MySpace newsfeed is a second change. Some back-end alterations have opened up the info box. Instead of just being able to view status updates, Digsby can now pull in your MySpace activity stream, letting you see the full newsfeed and flip through photos.

In addition to socializing, Digsby's latest uses OneRiot's real-time Web search engine to add Web search. Hit Control and F while in the buddy list view to begin.

In a nod to Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 7 operating system, Digsby has also added a new user-created skin option for the buddy list. You can select the light blue Windows 7 skin from the skins drop-down menu, and swap among it, the metallic look, and a tinted theme (our personal favorite).

You can download the new build; alternatively, existing users can wait for Digsby to push out the update.