• Snowl: Unified Messaging In Your (Firefox) Browser

    Erick Schonfeld

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

    Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

    Mozilla Labs announced a new project today called Snowl. It is an add-on for Firefox that aims to bring all of your messages together in one place, whether it is from email, SMS, Twitter, or RSS/Atom feeds. The project right now is an early, buggy prototype that only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. So that is nothing special.

    But once email and SMS is folded into the mix, it could become a very powerful messaging center, built right into the browser. It will allow you to search through all of your messages and feeds, both public and private, no matter where they originate.

    The current version of Snowl shows messages in one of two ways: in a three-paned window much like a traditional e-mail client, and in a river-of-news view. This is a separate project from Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, although it does overlap somewhat. The point of Snowl is specifically to “help you follow and participate in online discussions.”

    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.”)


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