Mozilla Launches Raindrop, An Exploration in Messaging Innovation

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 26 Oct 2009

When you say Mozilla, you immediately think of the Firefox browser. It is after all the flagship Mozilla product, the web browser that will someday surpass Microsoft Internet Explorer’s market share. But the Mozilla Foundation is behind other software applications, like email client Thunderbird for example. Or the recently released Raindrop, a software application developed by the same guys behind Thunderbird, that comes with the tagline “an exploration in messaging innovation.”

According to Mozilla, Raindrop is meant to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to come up with practical, compelling messaging experiences. It sounds complicated, I now, so here is a brief explanation: Raindrop will unify email, Facebook, Twitter and other online communication channels into a singe interface. To avoid clutter and annoyances, Raindrop will separate routine messages from important ones.

On behalf of the Raindrop development team, Andy Chung, Bryan Clark, Dan Mosedale, David Ascher, Mark Hammond, and James Burke, comment: “In today’s world people use a combination of Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, Email, etc. to communicate. For many of us this means that we have to keep an eye on an ever-growing number of places we might get new messages. As a result, we never know that we’ve actually processed all the important messages, because our email has been overwhelmed by noise which obscures the real messages from real people. Raindrop is an effort that starts by trying to understand today’s web of conversations, and aims to design an interface that helps people get a handle on their digital world. At the same time, it creates a programming interface (API) that helps designers and developers extend our work and create new systems on top of that data.”

If you would like to get more details on Raindrop, you can visit the official Raindrop webpage here.
Raindrop is still in its early development phase, so we cannot provide you with a download link. The source code is available for download here as open source software under Mozilla Public License.


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