Mozilla tries to build the ultimate in-box: Raindrop
Mozilla's Thunderbird team has been working on software called Raindrop that aims to unify communications channels such as e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter into a single interface with enough built-in smarts to separate the important messages from the routine.
"E-mail used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the internet, but that's no longer the case today. In today's world people use a combination of Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, e-mail, etc., to communicate. For many of us this means that we have to keep an eye on an ever-growing number of places we might get new messages," the Raindrop developers said in a blog post about the technology. "We hope to lead and spur the development of extensible applications that help users easily and enjoyably manage their conversations, notifications, and messages across a variety of online services."
A key part of the effort will be to spotlight messages that are important.
"Raindrop intelligently separates the personal messages from the bulk," said developer Bryan Clark. Among other things, it will automatically recognize messages from e-mail lists and from sources such as Facebook or Amazon that send numerous updates, filing them accordingly.
Given Mozilla's two main projects, Firefox and Thunderbird, there's one particular interesting aspect to Raindrop: It's a Web application, not downloadable software. "Our flagship applications will be built entirely for any modern web browser that supports Open Web technologies," the developers said. However, the group expects to support front-end software, including applications for mobile devices, that can use the Web-based service.
The vision has been knocking around Mozilla for some time. David Ascher said in a 2007 interview as he was taking over as chief executive of the Mozilla Messaging subsidiary, "People end up subscribing to more and more channels of communications. It makes it hard to keep track of what's going on if they have to check six different inboxes, search across a variety of systems." He said the group wanted to address the issue.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
- by maniopas October 27, 2009 1:16 AM PDT
- Well, I think that such technologies already exist. Take Flock (can be found here: http://www.flock.com/ ). It is based on Firefox, but it can also automatically check an extreme amount of blogs, online media sharing services, webmail services and generally most things that would require checking every now or then.
<br />It allows things such as adding a detected blog fead with just one click for watch.
<br />Personally, I have Flock monitoring my accounts at gMail, Yahoo Mail, Picasa, Wordpress, AOL mail, CNet blogs, uTube, Twitter and Facebook. It is really very cool.
<br />I do not know if other technologies such as this exist, though. I think that at some time I came across a Thunderbird blug-in that would enable synchronization with various e-mail accounts, but I am not sure. And I have definitely used some multiple-account-enabling program, but all that I have tried were not my idea of a nice interface.
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