Mozilla Labs announced a new project today called Snowl. It is an add-on for Firefox that aims to bring all of your messages together in one place, whether it is from email, SMS, Twitter, or RSS/Atom feeds. The project right now is an early, buggy prototype that only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. So that is nothing special.
But once email and SMS is folded into the mix, it could become a very powerful messaging center, built right into the browser. It will allow you to search through all of your messages and feeds, both public and private, no matter where they originate.
The current version of Snowl shows messages in one of two ways: in a three-paned window much like a traditional e-mail client, and in a river-of-news view. This is a separate project from Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, although it does overlap somewhat. The point of Snowl is specifically to “help you follow and participate in online discussions.”
You can download Snowl here (for those brave enough to try it—Mozilla warns that it is ” primitive implementation with many bugs, and subsequent versions will include changes that break functionality and delete all your messages, making you start over from scratch.”)
A side benefit of this to Mozilla is that they will have a fresh batch of new user registration activity for the AddOn service.
friendfeed killer
Only if you can have group conversations AROUND the other messaging content in Snowl. To me, that’s what makes friendfeed the awesome. Whereas, say, when someone posts a share in GoogleReader I have to email them or share the same item with a new note to respond to them about that share, in FriendFeed I can comment right where the share shows up in the feed, and not only my friend, but anyone, can continue the conversation from there. Snowl couldn’t really do that without some sort of server-side infrastructure, so it won’t be the same thing.
Is this any different then what the Flock browser delivers?
I don’t think this will kill anything, but it might replace gmail notifier.
Potentially a great tool for road warriors.
Can we PLEASE stop using the word fold in these articles?? It makes no sense! It is so annoying.
It does if you bake.. drop in the chocolate bits and fold in the cookie batter.
wow, I’ve been working on an idea like this for a while now… good to see the big dogs got the same inspiration.
hopefully it’ll work out!
O RLY?
Take a look at atn at http://www.alltradersnet.com it already does that
-twitter
I don’t really understand why exactly we need to have everything within Firefox. Now we switch from one app to another for multiple tasks and if all the messages are in the browser, we will simply have to switch between tabs. Where is the real difference? It is still multi-tasking and it still shifts your attention between tasks, that’s the problem, not where exactly you perform those tasks.
Good point.
CTRL+Tab vs. ALT+ Tab
Mozilla stands to benefit the more you do within their product, however. Only problem is, not many people use FF+ add-ons. Google’s referral fees are causing bloat at this foundation.
I work for a company that develops software using Mozilla’s technologies. Personally, I’m disappointed with the user interface focus of many Mozilla Lab projects. Mozilla Labs is becoming a UI research center for the Firefox web browser. Snowl is one example. It is primarily an end-user interface experiment. The Concept Series featured on their home page is yet another UI driven project that is looking for people to contribute to the future development of the Firefox online experience.
The UI focus is obvious on the Labs project page – all the projects except one are listed under “User Interface”. Personally, I think Weave and and Prism have a broader scope than just a UI project.
UI innovation is important. It’s sexy. It appeals to end-users. But when the UI becomes the primary driving force for Lab initiatives you no longer have a research Lab – you have a design factory for UI components.
No IM?
I really like the concept. But I already do some of this through flock and have found it pretty damn good so far. That said may be worth a try – the more I can do with firefox the less I’ll have to switch between browsers.
Looks like a handy tool.