Mozilla Snowl Messaging Tool

Yesterday, Mozilla announced Snowl, a prototype of a universal messaging/content aggregation plugin for Firefox.
Snowl is a new tool launched in Mozilla Labs that, while an extremely early prototype, shows some potential. Snowl is part of broader work at Labs to explore both near-term tools for Firefox and longer-range overhauls of the browser.
Snowl — a compression of the words “snow” and “owl” — can be downloaded from Mozilla’s add-on site.
The basic idea behind Snowl is to bring together messaging and feed reading in the browser. Snowl allows you to view your messages in two ways: a traditional three-pane view that looks very similar to most RSS readers or email clients. Snowl is a part of the Concept Series initiative that invites external contributions in terms of ideas and innovations for designing the development of future browsers and an enhanced web experience.
Mozilla’s Myk Melez describes Snowl as a browser extension that helps users ‘follow and participate in online discussions’ and track all your conversations across various networks, services, protocols and messaging types. According to the company, Snowl is designed to answer the question of whether or not a browser can “help you follow and participate in online discussions.
Mozilla Lab’s call for participation in exploring the future of the browser, and the experimental Weave service, comes Mozilla’s efforts to move messaging beyond email and to the types of communication now commonplace across social networks, blogs and services such as Twitter. Mozilla is still unsure of whether or not people will actually want to use the service and is opening up Snowl for us to figure that out.
Currently, Snowl just showcases two ways to blend news and nanoblog feeds into a browser. The Snowl experiment is important, though, and no doubt many people would want a more integrated experience. In its current incarnation, Snowl only allows you to view your Twitter messages and RSS feeds, though Mozilla is planning on adding more messaging services in the near future. The team behind Snowl also assumes that paradigms that shape the development of browsers also apply to navigating messages.

It would be great to have one unified client for everything, but different types of content simply require different user interfaces and a three-pane view of your Twitter messages mixed in with RSS feeds (and potentially your IM messages) simply isn’t a very effective way of handling these different types of information, especially once Mozilla starts adding more interactivity to Snowl.

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.

With Snowl on the street, so to speak, Melez said the next step is to collect feedback from users, developers and potential developers, then decide whether it’s worthwhile to continue developing the add-on and, by extension, the concept of in-browser messaging, or just scrap the whole idea.

Mozilla wants to help us on the conversational journey, which is why the company has launched Snowl, a new tool that offers a small glimmer of hope for those seeking communications nirvana. That makes it similar to the existing Thunderbird client, although Mozilla claims that the objective of Snowl is to “help you follow and participate in online discussions”.

“Mozilla believes that browsers are specially designed to address issues most users have in handling messages – weeding out the less important messages and navigating through the messages – and with Snowl, it aims to bring messaging platforms into one central location to let you surf the Web and handle messages at the same time. “