Mozilla Labs’ Snowl Prototype = NOT INNOVATIVE
by Shah
Last week, the Mozilla Project had released Snowl which is an experimental messaging prototype that could allow people to collate and view messages from email, RSS, messaging, and social networks.
Quoting from Mozilla Labs:-
It’s a prototype Firefox extension that integrates messaging into the browser based on a few key ideas:
1. It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.
2. Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones.
3. A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later.
4. Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages.
*cough*
1. Most systems offer Atom/RSS feeds. Heck, if RSS 2.01 were to become a standard (despite prev. incompatibility issues,) there would be no fuss.
2. The importance of message can be set using tagging/labeling.
3. A search features isn’t much of a hassle, is it?
4. Browser functionality - trivial issue.
You may be wondering the reasons behind which I’m being kinda shallow and a bit annoyed @ Snowl. Well, it’s not innovative for Opera has an aggregator which does the same. It even has the ability to send messages (reply to a blog comment for e.g.) The interface is way ‘cleaner’ than the UI mess of “River of News” view (Major WTF @ the scrolling!) The labeling and grouping of feeds are easy btw - all done by mouse clicks.
I’ve hope that it can flourish into something way better later one for it is currently only a prototype.
The only consolation - it is open source.
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