|
By Cara Garretson
The latest project by Mozilla Labs is designed to help users of social networking sites make sense of the flood of messages generated by services such as Twitter, Facebook, and others, giving them an integrated place to read messages that are personal and important while editing out much of the noise that clogs e-mail inboxes today.
Called Raindrop, the software is defined as a mini Web server that is installed on a PC to integrate messages such as e-mails, tweets, IMs, and RSS feeds that come from different sources. The software is designed to intelligently sort these messages so users only read what they care about, according to a post on Mozilla's Raindrop Web site.
The new software will also be designed to let users react to all these types of messages via their "favorite modern Web browser," which the post defines as Mozilla Firefox, Apple's Safari, or Google's Chrome.
Raindrop, which is being developed by the same team that created Mozilla's Thunderbird open-source e-mail client, is based on the principal that Web 2.0 communications should be integrated into e-mail, instead of being linked but separate.
For example, when a friend sends an e-mail with an embedded link to a YouTube video, that video should be played in the e-mail client, instead of forcing the user to launch a new browser tab, the post says. Also, when automated messages and alerts are sent to an e-mail client they should be automatically organized for users, instead of forcing them to manually review them or develop complicated filters, the post says.
"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," reads the Raindrop development team's post. "As a result, we never know that we've actually processed all the important messages, because our e-mail has been overwhelmed by noise which obscures the real messages from real people."
Raindrop will automatically separate out personal messages from those sent by mailing lists and other sources of automated alerts and communications, and users will be able to customize how they wish to group these notifications.
Instead of building yet another application to organize and prioritize communications, Mozilla's goal with Raindrop is to help users get a handle on the messages they're already getting, therefore making those existing channels of communication more meaningful."We aren't trying to invent new protocols or build new messaging systems, rather focusing on building a product that lets users get a handle on the systems we already use," reads the post.
The current version of Raindrop is being referred to as 0.1, meaning "not yet ready for everyday use," but the development team is looking for input from developers and users alike.
Mozilla hopes Raindrop will be customized by its users and will also become a platform for third-party products, according to the post.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
