Mozilla Messaging Unveils Raindrop 92
Posted
by
timothy
from the but-these-are-friendly-buzzwords dept.
from the but-these-are-friendly-buzzwords dept.
mhammond writes "Mozilla Messaging has just unveiled a Mozilla Labs project, Raindrop, an experiment with Open Messaging on the Open Web. Raindrop uses couchdb as a storage engine and to serve the HTML/CSS/Javascript application itself, while the back-end is primarily written in Python. Although it is early days yet, the concept that you own your data may be what sets this apart from Google Wave."
Re:I hope that will be a non browser client (Score:3, Interesting)
The vast majority of people with a computer tend to live in their browser's window. And they like it!
By contrast, in the presentation videos for Google's Wave, the ncurses interface (or what seemed like one) garnered the loudest applause. A narrow audience or limited subset of users? Perhaps, but I expect there's enough of us who find using a web browser for anything other than browsing the web inefficient, if not abhorent.
Still, the march to develop new "messaging technologies" is interesting, especially with respect to certain things like collaboration. Personally, I don't even think web or browser-based email works (at least for anyone other than trivial or casual use), so I'm happy to sit things out and watch on the sidelines. Who knows. Maybe they're onto something.
Re:Google Wave (Score:2, Interesting)
Not to get too "640k is all anyone needs" here, but having used Wave now for about a week or two, the current client doesn't seem to be much more than a multi-user version of Omni Outliner [omnigroup.com] (with less functionality).
Yeah, you could write new clients that make it work like twitter or IM or email. But those things already exist and work just fine. I don't see it as a very useful way to real-time collaborate on a document (compared with other, better ways- whether google docs or wikis...) So I guess I'm not sure what the hype is about exactly. Does google know what Wave is supposed to be, or is it just putting it out there and hoping it grows into something?
Re:Finish Thunderbird first? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I can't wait for TB 3 to be finished soon enough. So far TB 3 doesn't work with the Lightning Calendar add-in so I am stuck with TB 2.X for that.
I switched from Outlook to Thunderbird and I want to have email and calendar options in the same program. Maybe Raindrop can do that, but until it does finish TB 3 for those of us without Wave servers before you finish Raindrop.
In order to update my Timex Data Link watch I have to copy data from Thunderbird to Outlook and then sync up with Outlook using the Timex Data Link software. But I am going to get rid of my Data Link watch as it is old and nothing replaced it. I am going with a solar powered digital watch. I hope to find something that can store my contact and calendar like the Data Link did, but I like the idea of wearable data.
My Cell phone is a TracFone, and won't do data transfers, I cannot afford a BlackBerry, Smartphone, or iPhone, and I can barely afford a PDA and since it isn't wearable I can lose it easily as I lost many others.
Thunderbird needs to be finished and then syncing up with other calendar applications and servers before the team moves on to finish Raindrop, because so far Thunderbird isn't that good a competitor to Outlook yet.
Re:Finish Thunderbird first? (Score:3, Interesting)
Use KOrganizer (Kalendar+KMail). It's great.
More frontends (and editors) for remind would be nice too ... [google.com]