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.

[petarpavlov]

When can we expect to try a demo version of the Raindrop Web application?

[forever4now]

Cool!

Hopefully, the UI will be HTML5 based. Then, there will be yet another reason, for people to upgrade to a modern web browser.

Yes, for the .0000001% of people who a) use this app, and b) use a "modern" web browser...

[forever4now]

@ unidentified

There are LOTS of cool HTML5 websites, for people using "modern" browsers (Firefox 3.5, Chrome 3.0 & Safari 4.0) to check out. Here are just a few that I've discovered:

HTML5 WEBSITES & DEMOS
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
http://www.canvasdemos.com/
http://html5gallery.com/
http://html5demos.com/
http://www.youtube.com/html5
http://demo.sproutcore.com/video/
http://www.rgraph.net/
http://tinyvid.tv/
http://oggtv.com/

WEB APP DEVELOPMENT
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siOHh0uzcuY&NR=1
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2009/future-of-web-design-glasgow/
http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/10/05/future-of-web-apps-london-html5
http://diveintohtml5.org

Note: Some HTML5 video sites use H.264 & some use Ogg Theora. If it doesn't work, try a different browser.

[MyRightEye]

Yeah, well I have been waiting for Thunderbird to provide a real alternative to Apple's mail, for what, 5, maybe 6 YEARS now?? I won't be holding my breathe for yet more vaporware.

[bousozoku]

I tried Apple's mail application after using Mozilla's mail and that's why I'm using Thunderbird. Apple's mail application never worked that well, but it was really cute.

[SactoGuy018]

I Mozilla can make "Raindrop" work with Google Wave, they have a potentially huge winner right there! It will become a very compelling reason to use Wave in the first place.

[beowulf74]

Is there any dev. work going on with Thunderbird or just security and bug fixes? It's beyond ancient now. :-(

[quirK]

I'm using 3.0 beta.

[Philstera]

Looks like Google Wave is already history. Two vaporware products trying to outdo each other. Nothing like a virtual software environment to get the fanboys going

[DavisFreeberg]

I think that this area is wide open to competition. I'm not sure why other email portals haven't made it easier to connect all the dots. In terms of highlighting messages, I'd like a system that can learn from my own behavior. If there's an RSS feed that I always click first when there's 200 other stories to pick from, it would be nice to have a piece of software recognize that and give it more prominence. I also hope that searching of all sources is included.

[anhtney]

kinda sounds like google wave

[worried1]

The author said this was needed because people are subscribing to many channels of communication but how many did so just to try the channel out and have stopped using many of these channels? I would like to know the details of operation before jumping on the raindrop bandwagon. This could turn out to be another avenue for attack since most users will not even read the license agreement and will not know what they agree to.

[bousozoku]

Well, it makes sense since Thunderbird already handles newsgroups and they've been on the way out since the late 1990s, even if it's happening slowly.

It seems to me an RSS feed reader could do something similar to Raindrop by using smart filters.

[klzjr03]

I think that Mozilla needs to finish Thunderbird 3 before it starts on anything else. I have been waiting for a while for the RC release of Thunderbird 3.

[One-Eared Gundark]

I second that, klzjr03.

Thunderbird seems to be stuck in the slow lane for the dev teams. I've been waiting forever (or at least version 2.0) for Thunderbird to incorporate a GOOD calendar system. Moz's existing calendar (Firebird? Sunbird?) is developed even slower than TB.

Don't hate me, but I've defected to Windows Live Mail just for the shared on-line calendar support. Of course, Live Mail is so slooooooww when downloading mail.

Heck, I'd pay for a good Outlook killer from Mozilla. I'm not smart enough to code, but I can contribute money and bug reports.

[maniopas]

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.
It allows things such as adding a detected blog fead with just one click for watch.
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.
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.