One major advantage of this new version is the improved 'River of News,' which is now beautifully presented. Also, you can now send Twitter messages right from the Snowl toolbar, which is nice, but we would still like to see the promised integration with other messaging services like Facebook, AIM, or Google Talk. It would also be nice if Snowl integrated Twitter replies right from the interface, but as of now, that isn't possible.

While these new features are nice, Snowl is also still very rough around its edges. It is relatively hard to actually subscribe to a feed in Snowl, for example. Also, you can't set how often your RSS feeds and Twitter subscriptions are refreshed.

Sources and Authors

One 'feature' we didn't like in the first version of Snowl has thankfully been fixed: When you display your subscriptions, Snowl's last version insisted on showing every single one of your Twitter contacts as a separate entity, right there with your regular RSS subscriptions. Now, you can go from this 'flat' model to a more traditional hierarchical model that separates sources like RSS feeds and your Twitter stream), from authors.

The Philosophy Behind Snowl

While we have been critical of the implementation, we do like the philosophy behind Snowl and think that it is a worthwhile experiment. We do like the idea of conversations and people being treated as first-class objects, for example, though the current implementation of this still feels a bit clumsy.

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.