What if you could Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Gmail, Flickr, and read Blogs all in one feed from one website?
That’s what the makers of Raindrop, from Mozilla Labs- makers of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird free software, aim to accomplish with their new beta software. To take all the social sites in your life and create one aggregate feed into a browser-based website that automatically filters out the stuff you don’t want. The idea is similar to Trillian or Pidgin for creating an aggregate of all your instant messaging protocols. Sounds simple, right? Or maybe just too good to be true.
It separates your spam and social networking messages from robots or applications (Farmville, for example) and other detritus from the stuff you actually want like e-mails from your mother, or status updates from your friends. All of the other types of messages are put into special folders you can easily access from the main page should you want them!
According to their website: “Raindrop uses a mini web server to fetch your conversations from different sources (mail, twitter, RSS feeds), intelligently pulls out the important parts, and allows you to interact with them using your favorite modern web browser (Firefox, Safari or Chrome).” Their slogan is “Open messaging for an Open web”.
We’ll see what develops and how far they take this new technology. I, for one, would love not having to visit five sites just to keep up with all that’s going on…
