Mozilla, the people that brought you Firefox, are now aiming to serve all your Web communications needs by combining email, social media, and more in a single unified software interface.

The team that has historically produced Mozilla’s Thunderbird email system has also been working on a different and perhaps more interesting project. They are producing what they hope is the only Web communication tool you will ever need, wrapped up in a neat package named Raindrop, according to a CNET story. As importantly, the Mozilla team is trying to build enough intelligence into Raindrop that the tool itself will be able to figure out which messages are important and which are not. One developer said, “Raindrop intelligently separates the personal messages from the bulk.”

The Raindrop developer team explained their objectives in a blog post, which included the following: “E-mail used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the internet, but that’s no longer the case today. In today’s world people use a combination of Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, e-mail, 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. We hope to lead and spur the development of extensible applications that help users easily and enjoyably manage their conversations, notifications, and messages across a variety of online services.”

The Raindrop concept has been in the brainstorming stage at Mozilla for at least a couple of years. When David Ascher took over as CEO in 2007, he said “People end up subscribing to more and more channels of communications. It makes it hard to keep track of what’s going on if they have to check six different inboxes, search across a variety of systems.” Mozilla aims to make that task easier with Raindrop. That is a tall order, and one which may be difficult to fulfill, given the speed at which the Web continues to invent new ways to communicate.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 1:10 pm under Internet, Open source.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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