Oh it is so on! After just a couple of weeks out in the wild, Google Wave has itself a competitor. And it’s from Mozilla. Who knew? The war for the next best modern communication tool has begun. At least, it will soon.
A few weeks ago, Mozilla, as many of you may now as the company that brought you the Firefox browser, have announced plans to release a web application that they hope will streamline the way you intake information, called Raindrop. This comes right on the heels of the preview release of Google Wave, pegged by Google as what email would look if it were invented by today.Wave hopes to be another/new way to communicate. Raindrop wants to help you organize all the communication you already do.
After using Wave for a few weeks, with a couple of contacts, I found it to be just another thing to check. I already use AIM, Facebook Chat, Google Chat, and Twitter to stay in contact with humanity (let us not forget good ol’ face-to-face conversations). Even with a desktop application like Waveboard, I found no need for Wave, no way to integrate it into my online lifestyle.
Just about everyone these days uses Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, blah blah blah blah blah. If you read blogs, such as this one, chances are you know about and/or use just about every social media tool out there. There are tons. We all spend so much of our day checking on all of them for updates, it gets me thinking: how do we have the time to update if were always looking at other peoples posts and profiles? And, would we have anything to post, since were spending all of our time checking on what others are doing? It boggles my mind. Really, these are the most pressing issues in my life.
Hearing about Raindrop let me breathe a sigh of relief. It is not trying to be something entirely new. It takes your email, tweets, Facebook messages, flickr updates, YouTube posts, Google Docs, and whatever else you may have, and puts it all in one place. According to the Raindrop blog ,Raindrop is an effort that starts by trying to understand today’s web of conversations, and aims to design an interface that helps people get a handle on their digital world. There is so much information we need to digest, chances are you may miss the messages that are actually important. Messages that are from, like, real people.
Though only in version 0.1 (yes, point-one), if youre feeling ballsy, you can download the developer code from the Raindrop website. Mozilla, in typical-Mozilla fashion, wants YOU to play with their code. Come up with mock-ups, ask questions and hack away! Its open source, so go crazy!
Im excited! Are you?
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