Mozilla Raindrop – Great Idea, But Will It Deliver?

Mozilla has produced Firefox, which is a wildly popular e-mail application, and many would say it broke the too long held hegemony of Microsoft, in an unfair war it waged on users. The program has continued to be in the forefront of design, and leads in ways other than mindshare.

On the other hand, Thunderbird was a great starter, out of the gate with a bolt; but it was soon just a pacer in a thoroughbred horserace, becoming something that only the most die-hard of fans still use. Yet it had such promise, because the public was promised that it would get an in-race injection of steroids, in the form of Eudora code. Too bad that was just a tactic, and never really happened.

Now, Mozilla speaks of a post  e-mail era, where sane people are being overloaded by mail streams, and the staccato hits of Twitter, along with RSS feeds and still other streams of information, with which people are trying to keep up, and not be crushed by the information overload.

Rather than pull back, and try to intelligently filter all that comes into view, the Mozilla Raindrop project aims to keep up with the continuous stream of unending data. The concept of bringing everything to the local desktop, then allowing choice is a great one, but my question is not whether Mozilla can do it, but will they?

The announcement in ComputerWorld gives an overview -

Mozilla has launched a software project designed to let people better manage the voluminous stream of messages coming from sources such as Twitter and Facebook into their e-mail.

Raindrop is not another e-mail client, however, said Bryan Clark, the design lead for Mozilla messaging. Mozilla describes it as a “mini Web server” that is installed on a PC and collects conversations and messages from a variety of sources and then intelligently sorts them.

The purpose of Raindrop is to allow people to have a clearer view of the messages they’re getting. It also will prevent personal messages from being obscured in an e-mail box among, for example, a morass of Facebook or Flickr notifications. It will also be able to handle notifications from YouTube, blogs and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.

“E-mail was already overloaded” even before Web services such as social networks started sending updates to users, said Clark in a video posted to the Raindrop Web site.

Clark gives the example of an advertisement from an airline, for instance, that pushes “a message from my mom out of the way,” when the latter message is clearly more important than the former.

Raindrop “intelligently separates the personal messages from the bulk,” Clark said. Direct messages and replies on Twitter, for example, are more like e-mail than other bulk messages sent on Twitter. Raindrop will separate those direct messages and replies.

Messages from mailing lists are also listed separately from personal messages, along with those from other Web services such as Amazon.com or eBay. Users can decide where they want certain types of notifications to appear.

What a great concept!

Is Raindrop to be another project of great promise, only to be left withering on the vine? If we think about it, the last builds of Thunderbird, while it was actively being developed, tried to include RSS feeds, yet the implementation was so clumsy that it deserved only pre-alpha status, yet was released as a beta version. Since that time, there have been re-wraps of the Thunderbird code, with so little changed that I wonder why anyone bothered.

Will Raindrop be another aborted attempt at greatness, pushed aside because the company only has time, money, and will for one superstar (Firefox)? Songbird is a nice toy, but it hasn’t shown the kind of changes that are worthy of a program that is being worked on by more than one person in their spare time.

So I ask, “Will Raindrop dry up, only to leave a mark where a bright spot once was?”

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Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. Henry Ford

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