Mozilla mashes up messaging with Raindrop

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 23 Oct 2009 at 10:37

Mozilla has unveiled a new project aimed at collating and sorting messages from multiple sources, including social networks and email.

Project Raindrop is the brainchild of the team behind the Thunderbird messaging client, and is essentially a re-imagining of email that's intended to tackle the fact that people must now deal with messages from sources as diverse as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, IM clients, email and even YouTube.

However, rather than simply fetching messages and dumping them in a window, Mozilla promises that Raindrop will intelligently sort them - so that personal and important messages rise to the top of the pile, ahead of special offers from companies, for example.

A central principle behind Raindrop is that messaging should be personal — we want Raindrop to be people-centric both in how we process messages

"A central principle behind Raindrop is that messaging should be personal — we want Raindrop to be people-centric both in how we process messages, and in how we can help give people control over their personal data and experiences," the Raindrop development team explains on its blog.

"When a friend’s link from YouTube or Flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message, rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser tab.

"Notifications from computers and mailing lists should be organised for you, not clutter your inbox or require tedious manual filter setup. It should be easy to smoothly integrate new web services into your conversation viewer entirely using open web technologies," they conclude.

As with Mozilla's other projects, the project will be open source and support add-ons that allow people to customise it as they wish. The project is currently in its early stages, with the team describing it as an "open experiment in messaging on the web", and to that end they're still tinkering with different interfaces and designs.

Unlike the Thunderbird project, Raindrop will be a web-based service accessible through "your favorite modern web browser (Firefox, Safari or Chrome)". Spot the missing browser...

There's no word on when we can expect to see the first Alpha.

Raindrop arrives as Google opens up its own email revamp, dubbed Wave, to testers.