Mozilla Launches Snowl Messaging Prototype

Jack Spine writes with the story that the Mozilla project "has launched 'Snowl' — an experimental messaging prototype that could allow people to collate and view messages from email, RSS, messaging, and social networks. From the article: 'Key ideas behind the project, called 'Snowl', are to enable users to prioritise messages by importance, and have a search-based interface for message retrieval, according to Mozilla developer Myk Melez. "Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions?" wrote Melez in a blog post on Wednesday. "Snowl is an experiment to answer that question." Another of the key ideas of the project is that browser functionality for navigating web content, including tabs, bookmarks, and history, be used to navigate messages.'"

The more smarts at the ends, the better

[1 a bee]

I haven't tried snowl, but I think this type of effort has promise. I believe we have already surrendered too much control to the convenience of web-based interfaces for social networking. (Think web-based email.) Snowl's approach is more end-to-end.

Every web property owner will, at the end of the day, protect their own turf--at the possible expense of the user. So, for example, I can't expect facebook to play nice with say a competitor like Plaxo. I'd like them to--because I have accounts at both, and find duplicating my personal information at both places, among other things, really tedious. And it's only getting worse with time.

The solution to this is not yet another web-based aggregator. No, all that does is set up yet another middleman whose business model will be to eventually screw you. Much better to put all the smart at your end. That'll keep us, the end users, in control.

--
Have USB, Will Travel [faunos.com]

Login for Plugins?

[Bieeanda]

Yeah, this is off-topic, but jeez. I took one look at that River of News mock-up, and had to see if the real thing was as confusing as it looked-- scrolling horizontally and vertically with a format like that looks like a UI sprain waiting to happen.

So I go to download the plugin, to see if the river works better than it looks, and to see if I can finally figure out what the fuss about RSS is. Then I'm met with a login page, and that's where I stopped. I don't need to log in as a reminder that I'm taking a risk-- Christ almighty, Firefox already has a fucking username and password monitor built in, so that eliminates that after my first run through the hoops. If you want a barrier that makes me think for more than half a second, rather than makes me mutter about fishing another fucking web-page sign-up out of my bulk mail folder, throw up a boilerplate EULA and a yes/no radio button at the end.

Re:The more smarts at the ends, the better

[blahplusplus]

"Every web property owner will, at the end of the day, protect their own turf--at the possible expense of the user. So, for example, I can't expect facebook to play nice with say a competitor like Plaxo"

This is exactly where competition and the free market hurts us and causes a lot of inefficiency, I wish there were ways to 'de-marketize' certain area's so that standards can emerge. It would save us lots of money and lots of headaches if we could develop a framework for this to occur. IMHO, markets begin to break down when certain features of our world have to start obeying the laws of geometry vs some idealized form of socio-economic system.

Re:The more smarts at the ends, the better

[1 a bee]

markets begin to break down when certain features of our world have to start obeying the laws of geometry vs some idealized form of socio-economic system.

Someone once wrote (I think it was Nassim Taleb), that the magic of capitalism lies in its capacity for creative destruction; it's claim to efficiency (in the engineering sense) is really a farce. The free market, I'd venture to say, is only asymptotically efficient. That is, only the grotesquely inefficient die of natural causes; the rest are mostly victims of a circumstantial jungle.

Re:Search based interface?

[Yvanhoe]

"You had this discussion in 2005 with what's-his-name, John Johnson's chief engineer, throught that dumb skype thing they used back then. Can you tell me what you explained to him at the time ?"

I agree that grep + text file should be enough but if you need to copy-paste every message to a text file, then add tags to make them searchable, an automated tool would save you a lot of time. I know, you say "only important messages". Well from my experience you never know which messages might be important.

I tend to consider my mailbox to be my central archive so I sometime copy-paste important messages and pieces of information to myself, but I would really like to see it centralized.