Mozilla has released a new software project Raindrop that can help you better manage your messages of various types and from various sources such as email, twitter, RSS feeds, Facebook, etc. It aims at making it easier for you to attend to messages from people who are important to you, at a central place, irrespective of the source of the messages whether they are in email, on twitter, in some blog or as part of a social networking site such as Facebook. Given that the number of your messages and conversations from different online sources are continuously on the rise, Raindrop makes an effort to help you concentrate on the personal and important messages, bringing them together at one place, and segregating personal messages from the bulk messages. It will use a built-in experience that bubbles up what conversations are important to you.
Raindrop is an open source project and will use a mini web server to get your conversations from different sources such as email, twitter, RSS feeds, intelligently pull out the important parts / messages, and will allow you to interact with those important ones centrally using your favorite web browser such as Firefox, Safari or Chrome.
Mozilla explains the purpose of releasing the prototype of Raindrop software as under:
“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 organized 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.”
As people use various communication channels such as Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, Email, etc., they’ve to keep checking several places online for getting those messages. Many times this results into the real messages getting ignored in the noise generated by a large number of messages from various sources. Raindrop aims to manage these messages from diverse sources in a convenient way so that you don’t miss the important messages. It also creates a programming interface (API) to help designers and developers extend its work and create new systems on top of that data.
At present the software is not fully ready for download, but two iterations of Raindrops have been built with different designs (see figures below) and more designs are likely to be uploaded soon.
Thus, Raindrop appears to be concentrating on being an aggregator of your messages from different social networking forums with an added advantage of filtering the important messages that seek you immediate attention so that you won’t miss them in the mess created by a large number if irrelevant messages. It is a good idea but it depends upon how this idea is actually executed in Raindrop. It has to develop further and mature into a solid software product that can be really useful to people who are overwhelmed and overburdened with large number of messages – some of which are wanted but many of which are unsolicited. So, Raindrop has a good potential to help people, but how far it can go and achieve its objective is something for which we’ve to wait and watch. Meanwhile, you can also watch the following video:
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