Raindrop is one of the latest attempts to centralize all messaging and social netwroking activities on the web. It is an as yet unavailable prototype from mozilla messaging, the people developing the Thunderbird email client.
At first look at the early screenshots and concept videos available at the above site it looks like the developers are trying to aggregate all activity, twitter, email, youtube etc. into one place. As such this is not necessarily a new idea and places like Friendfeed (the link is to RGdot.com’s Friendfeed page) come close to doing that right now. I think what Raindrop tries to improve on is that experience but by allowing better syncing between devices, promising more customization and above all using an engine that can decide and help the user divide messages between the important or personal and the bulk or the spam – without going through filters or forever browsing through junk – it can be even more. Not to mention that this is an open source project which goes beyond supplying an API, like most services like twitter already do. Raindrop aims to allow it to be used to store info locally or on a server. All these therefore make it really fully extensible and customizable.
A promising new tool which may be able to stake a place on many desktops and gadgets.
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