Mozilla's Raindrop: An Open Conversation Aggregator
While most conversation aggregators are concerned with harnessing your river of data, Mozilla is breaking it down into manageable raindrops. According to a morning blog post on the Mozilla Labs site the company is launching the prototype for Raindrop 0.1, a product that they're calling "open messaging for the open web". While Mozilla's Snowl Firefox Add-On made it possible to follow streams and rivers of messages in your existing browser, Raindrop offers what appears to be a much cleaner interface and an API to hack on your own personal conversation dashboard.
Raindrop's mission is to "make it enjoyable to participate in conversations from people you care about, whether the conversations are in email, on twitter, a friend's blog or as part of a social networking site." Essentially, Raindrop is cutting out the noise and pulling in the information that is actually of interest.
While email clients can filter bot and spam messages, it's more difficult to discern between personal and general messages from real people. With Raindrop, users messages are categorized and prioritized. For example, in Twitter your direct messages and reply messages are highlighted while the rest of the stream is cast aside. Meanwhile, mailing list messages are also given their own category, separate from personal emails. As with most Mozilla products, the group will encourage front-end widgets and code from outside 3rd party developers.
While the tool certainly shows promise, it is currently only available to developers. The group's first priority is to build a downloadable installer. To ensure that you're one of the first non-developer testers, keep an eye on labs.mozilla.com/raindrop.
Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.
Thanks to Arjo for the tip!
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Thanks for the write-up, but after reading it, I'm not sure what was being said.
Who "categorizes and prioritizes" what when? Have you used this yourself, or are you just rewording some other blogpost for the ad revenue?
Oh John, I wish I got ad revenue from the site, but alas I do not. Basically the idea is that your emails (based on sender info and learned behavior) are categorized into separate boxes for review as per the enclosed image. This design is of course just an early version given that the product is a 0.1 and not 1.0 release.
Sounds pretty cool. When I started reading it reminded me a little of xobni.
it seems great ..interesting...it this something similar to waves..or different..??
What's scary is I came up with this years ago and worked with a couple of people on a semi-working prototype for something very similar over 5 years ago - the problem was back then the openness around and interconnectivity hadn't really taken off and it resulted in us 'hacking' others to mimic a login to some sites, then doing a whole lot of sorting stripping out html and fetching and redisplaying etc, in whole it worked but was very intensive in load for the above reasons and subsequently slow - also a serious lack of funds to even get it off the ground meant it didnt go further.We did however find a whole load of security holes, one major one allowed unrestricted access to a major email providers accounts if that account was currently logged in - which led us onto the next problem which was we would get something working and then someone would chance something and so whole chunks of code had to be reworked on a monthly basis. - fine if you have a huge team and funds, not so good when it was a few people working collectively.
Can't wait to see this go further.
This is a great development, as it has become harder for humans to effectively 'filter' the volume of data that we now want to extract from online. The important thing now will be for people who are selling or offering data as a service to manage their output effectively, otherwise, they too might not become 'highlighted'. I'm sure that this sort of datasifting is just in its infancy at the moment.
This sounds promising, the inboxes I use and organise are over complicated with folders and subfolders! I rate xobni although since migrating to another PC at work they removed admin permissions so I'm out in the wilderness again!