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A new project from Mozilla - the organisation behind Firefox and other widely-used open source software - aims to combine and prioritise today's multiple communications streams.
Mozilla Labs' Raindrop project puts a new spin on unified communications. Instead of being based on the idea of putting emails, voicemails and faxes into one inbox (yes, I know unified communications has gone beyond that initial idea), it's about combining and managing multiple internet communication channels.
Here's how the Raindrop team puts it: "Raindrop uses a mini web server to fetch your conversations from different sources (mail, twitter, RSS feeds), intelligently pulls out the important parts, and allows you to interact with them using your favorite modern web browser (Firefox, Safari or Chrome)."
a mini web server to fetch your conversations - most of the messages that Raindrop will organise and display are already in HTML. So rather than trying to build one big monolithic application, it makes more sense for Raindrop to concentrate on the collection and sorting of messages, and leave the display to the web browser that's already part of your everyday software.
intelligently pulls out the important parts - to my mind, this is the significant part. If all Raindrop did was collect all your messages into one place, it would be useful, but not especially valuable.
That's because if you're already struggling to find messages from people that are really important to you (boss, spouse/partner, significant clients, other close family, etc) simply tipping all the messages from different channels into one pot is likely to make it worse. It might save you flipping between applications, but that's about as far as it would go.
The idea behind Raindrop is that the important stuff (eg, personal messages) takes precedence over the routine (commercial messages, mailing list items and so on).
The part of the program that takes care of that is user-extensible, and you won't need to be a 'serious' programmer to make changes. That will be possible via relatively familiar technologies including HTML and JavaScript.
Those comfortable with conventional programming will have access to an API that will allow the creation of independent ways of handling messages.
Raindrop 0.1 has been released, but it's aimed at developers and others that may be interested in joining the project rather than something that can be put immediately into action by an average user. For example, it it necessary to build the program from source code rather than merely running an installer.
And work is still underway on the user interface, as the team investigates ways of presenting messages from multiple sources.
David Bass
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