The company Mozilla, famous for its Firefox web browser, is constantly evolving its technologies; its Labs division regularly releases new products for testing, and today another has been pushed out. It"s called "Raindrop", and it aims to serve as an open-source, experimental communication and email platform for users.
Raindrop, found here, has been described by Mozilla as, "an exploration in messaging innovation being led by the team responsible for Thunderbird, to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences." It"s in the form of a web-app, though to better describe it, we"ve embedded some videos below for you to watch. It"s said that Raindrop is not intended to replace your current email solution, but to simply build on it by providing a much more intelligent way of showing messages.
According to TechCrunch, David Ascher (CEO of Mozilla Messaging) stated that in the future, Raindrop will support any communication technology that has an open platform (such as Facebook, YouTube, FriendFeed, etc.), helping to boost the service. Mozilla additionally hopes that developers will build Raindrop based applications, as they"ll make an API available for those wishing to do so. Version 0.1 has been released today, which is obviously a very early prototype, though if you"re tech savvy you can look about trying it out here, providing you use Safari, Chrome or Firefox. For the rest of us, Raindrop will no doubt be available sometime in the hopefully-not-too-distant future.
Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.
Raindrop Software Components from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.