Answered Ascher, "While some engineers in Mozilla Messaging are working on both Thunderbird and Raindrop, we have no immediate plans to merge the two services. Thunderbird is a desktop client and Raindrop is hosted on the browser. These are separate services for separate types of users."

Ascher explained that Raindrop is still very much experimental and unlike Google Wave, Mozilla Messaging is not interested in creating a new protocol. Instead the service uses an open API to pull feeds and conversations out of existing communication tools. Meanwhile, Thunderbird is viewed as a desktop messaging client. For now, the group's priority is further improving both the Thunderbird product and the development environment. According to Ascher some of Thunderbird 3's best features include:

1. Search with Advanced Filtering: Thunderbird 3 allows users to search with a number of filters. Generally when we're searching for a note we know who some of the message participants are, we might remember if there is an attachment and we'd likely know who sent it. Thunderbird 3 also gives users the option to search by date via a timeline view and omit those who are not a part of the desired email.

2. Tabbed Email: Similar to Firefox's tabbed browsing, Thunderbird users can view emails in separate tabs and switch between tabs for easy referral. This is a great feature for group activities, travel and planning purposes.

3. Set up Wizard: Rather than being required to know your IMAP, SMTP, SSL/TLS settings, users can simply provide their name, email address and password to setup and sync new accounts. With this ease-of-use new staff and volunteers might actually have a chance to being up and running in the morning of their first day of employment.

4. Smart Folders: Users can view all of the incoming messages from their separate email accounts in one long stream or break them up in to separate folders.

5. Add-Ons Manager: Similar to Firefox's Add-On environment, Thunderbird is offering users the chance to download extensions, themes and plug-ins. Some of the most interesting ones include the Lightning Calendar client as well as plans to build a service where users can track Twitter followers and follow them back from within the messaging client.

Ascher sees this level of customization as one of Mozilla Messaging's strengths. Says Ascher, "Thunderbird is flexible for those who want to personalize it. As an organization, we've always empowered our users to choose the functionality of our products."

To download Thunderbird visit getthunderbird.com.

The Timeline

According to details on the newly revamped Silentale web site, the startup has three main features: the "Timeline," the "People Book," and "Connectors." In the timeline, you're presented with a view of all your messages from around the web and even from your mobile phone. Silentale is able to connect to Facebook, Google Contacts, most POP3/IMAP email accounts (such as those you might access in Outlook), Gmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Twitter, and it can pull in your SMS messages from your mobile phone. All these are presented in the scrollable timeline view with icons indicating their source along with the date, subject, sender, recipient, and of course, the message itself.

Connectors

The "Connectors" page is where you set up the various connections to the platforms whose messages you want archived. The list of connectors (see above) is short right now, but they promise more will be added in the future. These connectors crawl through your messages and contacts and archive them on the service once you've authorized Silentale to access those accounts. Not only will the service pull in the messages from that point forward, it will also work backwards in time to retrieve older messages too. Attached documents, including Office documents, photos, videos, and links will also be archived. Although at first you won't be able to search within these documents, that functionality will be "introduced shortly," reads the Silentale FAQ.

As for the SMS messages, they'll be archived using special mobile applications. At the moment, the company has developed an iPhone app and an Android app which both use your data connection to archive each text received to the Silentale service. Our only concern with this feature is in regards to those of us who choose to receive either Facebook or Twitter messages via SMS. Since that would be a large number of updates, it would be nice to exclude certain SMS short codes from the archiving process in order to save our precious battery life, which no doubt, the SMS archiving apps would eat up. Besides, since both Facebook and Twitter are available "connectors" on the Silentale service, those particular SMS texts would be redundant.

The People Book

Finally, there is the "People Book" view which is essentially an aggregated address book. Silentale finds the duplicate contacts from across your networks and combines their information together, merging their email, phone numbers, addresses, profiles, etc. into one single contact. This list, like the other views, is searchable, but it can be filtered by network as well to help you find your contacts with ease.

When you click on one of these contacts, all your conversations from across the various supported platforms are displayed. A message timeline at the top of the page lets you hop around from month to month and year to year, too.

Get Your Invite Now!

Of course, since Silentale hasn't launched yet, it's too soon to praise the service. We have no idea how well it will work. For all we know, it could be buggy and slow. But on paper, the service looks useful, promising, and - dare we say it? - exciting. How incredible would it be to have a master copy of all your communication from everywhere in one searchable resource in the cloud? We think it would be great. It's especially exciting since there aren't good ways to archive and search through your communications yet on some of these supported platforms - like Facebook and Twitter, for example.

Still, there may be some concerns about security when it comes to this service. How will Silentale access these networks? Hopefully they'll tap into Twitter via OAuth and into Facebook using Facebook Connect, but will they ask for our email passwords? That always makes people a little uneasy.

During the beta period, Silentale will be free, but when they publicly launch, it will be offered as a "freemium" type service. The basic (free) plan will allow 5 connections, unlimited contacts, but only 8 weeks of message history and a total storage space of 2 GB. The unlimited plan, which looks to be $50/year, will offer unlimited everything.

As we mentioned earlier, Silentale isn't open for business yet, but you can go ahead and sign up for your beta invite right here on the Silentale homepage. Just click the link on the upper-right.

Users will be able to create 'waves,' and add documents and collaborators to it. The system will feature concurrent rich-text editing, as well as email and IM-like messaging functions. Lars Rasmussen, one of the co-founders and lead engineers behind this project, especially stressed the real-time nature of Wave, where edits to a wave, be they new messages or edits in a document, appear immediately on the screens of all participants.

From what we have seen, Wave combines aspects of productivity tools, social networks, and micro-blogging. One of the most interesting features is that every change to a wave is captured and users can 'replay' how the specific wave developed over time. Wave will allow users to send private and public messages, and Google is heavily relying on HTML5 to make the product work well in modern browsers. We will have a more detailed look at all the features of Wave once we get access to the product itself.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Google is also making a set of APIs available to developers today. These APIs should give developers the ability to enhance Wave by building extensions for the core product, but also to embed Wave's features on other sites to make them more collaborative. One extension Google offers today, for those lucky enough to have access to Wave already, is a Twitter extension, and Google will also offer the ability to integrate OpenSocial gadgets into Wave.

Interestingly, Google is taking a very open approach with this new product. Not only will it give developers access to Wave's APIs, but the team also plans to open-source the protocols at the core of Wave, which really points at the greater ambition of the Wave team to see Wave and its protocols replace at least some of today's standard communications systems.

Some people won't respond to email (or take a while to respond) but reply immediately when you contact them with Twitter direct messages. Other people do the same in Facebook or FriendFeed. And yet other people send messages that pile up in your LinkedIn inbox.

Oh, and then I get the Skype pings.

And Gmail chat requests.

Oops, almost forgot FriendFeed.

This is getting out of hand. Do what you gotta do. If one of these is the only way to reach somebody I need to reach, then I'll use it. But these are too many messaging systems, and they are becoming a productivity drain.

Open Standards Always Win

Lots of people say that email sucks, that it's broken. This "e-fail" mantra is really about the inadequacy of email systems, something that many entrepreneurs recognize and are aiming to fix. The reason why email will always be with us is that it is an open standard, and this mantra is always worth repeating:

• Open standards always win
• Open standards always win
• Open standards always win

Winners and Losers from a Standards Shakeout

Twitter has possibly gotten this right once again. Because it is open, anybody can build an interface for its direct messages.

LinkedIn totally fails on this count. LinkedIn is a great and very useful research tool. When I don't know how to contact somebody, finding out which of my contacts knows them is invaluable. I use it frequently. But then, I want to be able to contact that person by email (or telephone, or Twitter if that is their preference). LinkedIn's messaging system is simply an irrelevant chore.

Methinks Facebook messaging may go the same way. Not being a big Facebook user, I may miss the point. But I have noticed that the sort of person who in the past preferred to be contacted via Facebook now prefers communication via Twitter.

The Integration Opportunity

This pain point is, of course, an opportunity. This integration has been referred to in the past as "unified messaging," but many of those solutions were too complex. You needed to buy into everything to use it at all.

Some great solutions are probably already out there. I am not talking about something like TweetDeck, which is perfect for somebody who lives in Twitter. Rather, the interesting thing is integrating Twitter direct messages into existing messaging and email systems.

Explosive Growth

In Q3 2008, VeriSign Messaging and Mobile Media Divison's mobile messaging networks enabled more than 58.3 billion messages per day to travel through their pipes...10% more than in the previous quarter and up from 280 million per day in Q3. Based on these record-breaking numbers, VeriSign projects that their mobile messaging networks will enable close to 200 billion total messages by the end of the year.

Enterprises and financial institutions have seen growing numbers of mobile messages sent, too. From Q3 2007 to Q3 2008, the total number of messages delivered rose from 129 to 227 million - a 115% increase.

Much of that activity comes from SMS's new position as the preferred platform for mobile banking. VeriSign's Mobile Banking platform, which includes seven of the top ten banking brands and three of the top five credit card companies, has grown 35% since last quarter alone.  

Mobile messaging, as defined by VeriSign, isn't just SMS, though. They take into account a number of different types of messages, including the following:

• SMS - Short Message Service. SMS is the most common form of mobile messaging, also referred to as "text" messaging.
• ICSMS - Inter-carrier Short Message Service. ICSMS messages are text messages exchanged between carrier networks.
• MMS - Multimedia Messaging Service. MMS allows users to send multimedia messages that include images, video and audio.
• ICMMS - Inter-carrier Multimedia Messaging Service. ICMMS messages are multimedia messages exchanged between carrier networks.
• P2P Messages - Person to person messages, or messages sent from one mobile user to another.
• A2P Messages - Application to person messages, or application-generated content such as news alerts, ring tones, promotional video clips, and enterprise messages that are sent to mobile users.

It's interesting that even as the iPhone and other app-filled devices grow in popularity, when it comes to getting information quickly, we're still turning to the mobile message - and now more than ever before. Will this trend ever level off as more people switch over to the smartphones whose "real internet" experiences no longer require text-based workarounds for getting the information needed? By the looks of these numbers, it doesn't appear that will be the case.

Image credit: enV by Nesster

AwayFind is a clever solution to the email overload problem. It lets you step away from your email without missing the most important messages - the so-called "email emergencies." That addresses one of people's deep-seated fears of email abandonment - the fear that some piece of critical information is going to arrive and we're not going to see it.

Basically, AwayFind is an auto-responder on steroids. You can configure its outgoing message to your liking. That message includes a link which allows people to get your attention if they are, in fact, emailing you about something urgent.

Your message could read, for example:

But What If It's Important?

Those who really needed to reach you can click the link to be taken to a web page where they can fill out a quick form, the results of which will be sent to you.

The form is not too cumbersome to fill out, but it has just enough fields to cause people to pause and consider whether or not it's really worth their effort. It also includes a CAPTCHA at the bottom to keep the spammers at bay. The form can be configured so that messages are categorized by the sender via a drop-down box (e.g. "Personal," "Business", etc.) and then those messages can be auto-routed to the appropriate person(s). In other words, AwayFind can automatically delegate your email for others to deal with.

When someone fills out the form, you're alerted based on the settings you chose during AwayFind's setup and configuration. You can receive a text message (SMS) or you can specify to be alerted at a different email account - that secret address you created for emergencies only. You can also check AwayFind's online inbox via the web.

With AwayFind, you can finally enjoy that vacation, to be sure, but you can also set up day-to-day templates to manage the everyday onslaught.

Pricing Info

The AwayFind service comes in two pricing tiers - a free version and a Professional version. The upgraded plan is $4.95/mo or $34.95/year and comes with a few extra features like a branding option which incorporates your logo, SSL security, integration with your web site, international SMS support, and more. It works with Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail/Windows Live Mail, Outlook, and others.

Now that you have all that extra time on your hands, you should probably read AwayFind's guide to not checking email (provided for free upon registration), as it will help you stick with your new plan. Remember, breaking email addiction is something we have to fight one day at a time.

The basic idea behind Snowl is to bring together messaging and feed reading in the browser. As Mozilla points out, it shouldn't matter where messages originate - instead, both RSS feeds, forums, social networks should all be able to live together happily in one interface. The team behind Snowl also assumes that paradigms that shape the development of browsers also apply to navigating messages.

However, at least in its current state, Snowl proves Mozilla wrong on most of these counts.

Snowl allows you to view your messages in two ways: a traditional three-pane view that looks very similar to most RSS readers or email clients. You can also view your messages in a River of News style view, but at least for us, that simply didn't work at all.

In both views, the left sidebar displays a mix of RSS feeds, blog authors, and the people you follow on Twitter. Sadly, when we imported an OPML file, it only picked up on maybe 7 of the 300 feeds in the file. As for your Twitter followers, it apparently also only displays those who recently sent a tweet (or at least, so we assume, as there really is no way of telling).

UI: Lots to be Done

Overall, this implementation leaves a lot to be desired, not just from the technical implementation (which didn't even allow us to update our feeds), but also from a conceptual point of view.

In the message list, for example, Mozilla stresses authorship. That makes sense for Twitter, but given that a lot of blogs have multiple authors or do not advertise a post's author explicitly, you end up with a lot of blogs that only list the title of a post but not the name of the blog.

All of these technical problems are probably easy to fix, but it also highlights some of the important differences between messages coming in from AIM, Twitter, or your email service and your news sources. The real problem here is that there is really very little advantage to having both your conversations and your news sources flow together into one interface. News consumption is, besides maybe sharing a post in Google Reader, a relatively passive experience, while messaging is exactly the opposite.

One Client Can't Rule Them All?

Clearly this is a version 0.1 product, so problems with the UI and other technical issues are to be expected. It is an interesting experiment, but in the end, it just creates confusion.

It would be great to have one unified client for everything, but different types of content simply require different user interfaces and a three-pane view of your Twitter messages mixed in with RSS feeds (and potentially your IM messages) simply isn't a very effective way of handling these different types of information, especially once Mozilla starts adding more interactivity to Snowl.

In order for Mozilla to turns this experiment into a useful tool, they will have to completely rethink the interface.

At the moment, Sendible supports Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SMS, and email, and since the service is still in beta, that's a good start. They will also soon be supporting Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and Xing.

To help you fill in the "To" field of your messages, Sendible integrates with your Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN accounts in addition to the social networks it supports to retrieve your contacts. As you begin typing a friend's name, it will helpfully auto-complete the entry. Another nice feature of Sendible is that it permits SMS messages to be sent - even internationally! - for free.

Sendible's UI could improve a bit - where HelloTxt lets you check boxes next to the service to update, at Sendible you have to update each service individually by selecting it from a drop-down box. However, according to the company, the ability to update multiple services at once will be added in the future.

Updating Twitter:

Although having to select each service is a bit cumbersome, there aren't many (any?) alternative services that let you schedule updates to some of these networks the way Sendible permits. Those updates can be set up to as "once-off" (British English for "one-off," it appears) or on a recurring schedule like daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. So, yes, you could set up tweets for your friends' birthdays now and look like you never forget.

Reminders & Events

In addition, another Sendible feature is their Reminders service. Using this feature, you can set up to have reminders sent to you via SMS or email. You can even import your Facebook friends birthdays to your Sendible Calendar which lets the service send you alerts.

A News Feed lets you track upcoming reminders and scheduled messages, but sadly, this feed does not actually have an actual "feed" associated with it. That is, there's no RSS for this page. However, the company tells me that they will be adding this in the next few weeks.

Sendible's News Feed:

Over the coming months, Sendible will be adding a surveys feature and an events feature, as well. The upcoming events feature will let you create events and invite people using any message type. People responding to the events will be able to RSVP from their mobile phone, within their social network, or by email.

Advertising Pays The Bills

The site already has a monetization plan thanks to its Advertising section called "My Ads." This feature lets advertisers (or anyone) place relevant ads in the messages that are sent out by email, SMS and social networking services. The advertisers are able to target their ads by keyword, location, and message type. For those that attempt to live completely ad-free (good luck!), this may be a deal breaker, but there are certainly others who won't mind as long as the ads aren't offensive in some way. The ads are also how the SMS messages remain free, even when they're being sent overseas.

Conclusion

Considering it's a beta service, Sendible doesn't look too bad, and it's definitely useful for scheduling messages. Nearly everything the service currently lacks is said to be coming soon, so instead of dismissing it right away for not having a particular feature, you may want to check back in a few weeks and see if that feature has been added. The only major drawback so far is the lack of support for some of the newer social status services like Brightkite and Plurk. To try Sendible for yourself, you can sign up here.

Image via Inside Facebook.

Facebook's Inbox is still a long way toward being a "Gmail-killer" -- or any other full email option killer, for that matter. Though the site does email full copies of messages -- a practice it began last December -- and though it lets users send messages to email addresses, it still lacks many of the "must have" features of an email client. Message organizing features, for example, are almost non-existent, as is the ability to reply to all recipients of a group message. There's also no way to reply to message sent from Facebook via an outside email client (i.e., the way you can reply to Basecamp message by replying to the notification email), nor is there a way to send messages to Facebook users from outside email clients (the latter is an effective type of spam control, however).

For some younger users, though, messages on sites like Facebook and MySpace have already supplanted email as the defacto method of asynchronous communication on the web. Our own Bernard Lunn argued last week that LinkedIn could do the same thing for him and Outlook by adding more robust messaging features. I've long argued that Facebook could transition into a network suitable for business, and better messaging capabilities is definitely a step in the right direction.