YNOT – Are you tired of moving from Twitter to email to Facebook and then back to Twitter just to keep in contact with friends or colleagues? If so, you might be interested in the latest project from the same team at Mozilla that created the Thunderbird email client.The new application is called Raindrop, and the Mozilla team has just released information about the prototype communications platform for Firefox, Safari and Chrome users. If it works as advertised it could be a convenient tool for organizing multiple methods of online communication into one interface.
Raindrop developers posted comments on their blog last week, explaining their goal of convergence.
“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. As a result, we never know that we’ve actually processed all the important messages, because our email has been by noise which obscures the real messages from real people.”
It’s not uncommon for developers to seek new ways to merge online communications tools when more than a few grow popular. For example, the rise of multiple Instant Messenger (IM) clients like AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger brought about programs like Trillian and Adium, which provide a single platform for sending IMs through any of the aforementioned services.
“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 (Firefox, Safari or Chrome),” the team said.
Mozilla is looking for developers who are interested in writing extensions for Raindrop. More information about the project can be found at http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop.
