Will Raindrop become email 2.0?

Mozilla Labs Raindrop

Raindrop is a very innovative concept from Mozilla Labs. Like countless others these days, Mozilla tries to reinvent email (or rather online communication). So what is Raindrop? A simplified answer is that Raindrop is a communication aggregator with a focus on prioritizing and classifying messages. One of the core objectives of Raindrop is simply to distinguish generic newsletters or broadcasts from personal messages (regardless if that’s a DM on Twitter or a personal email). That sounds like a great idea, but how does it work?

There are three parts to Raindrop, a back-end that fetches the messages, a database (CouchDB) which stores the messages, and a web-based front-end that displays the messages. While Raindrop is still in a very early stage, this project has great potential. Raindrop has been designed to be extremely flexible and modular so as to enable simple expansion.

While the database and back-end probably won’t matter a whole lot to the end-user, it is obviously very important for developers. Raindrop already supports a variety of data sources including RSS, email (POP3/IMAP I assume), Twitter and more. Because of this modular structure, adding support for more data sources will be fairly simple as long as they have an open API or protocol.

In addition to being able to run Raindrop online (in the cloud or on your own servers), you would also be able to run it on a local machine using a mini webserver, similar to Google Gears and Zimbra Desktop. That way you will have access to the data even in off-line mode.

The front-end is definitely not ready for prime time. At this point it resembles Twitter more than a full-blown communication portal. Considering that Raindrop has not even reached a first public release, it’s far too early to judge. Also, keep in mind that the front-end is completely separated from the back-end. In theory you should be able to hook up the back-end and database to pretty much anything.

What I really like with Raindrop is that is not just another aggregator. As I pointed out in my review of LifeIO, the problem with aggregation in general is that it often leads to information overflow. If Raindrop can deliver on the objective of distinguishing between personal messages and broadcasts well, it could definitely the next big communication tool.

Another great thing with Raindrop is that it does not try to create a new standard for communication online, but rather create a platform where we can access the data. While Mozilla is hardly the first company taking on this task, the combination of a strong product portfolio (Firefox and Thunderbird) and the fact that Raindrop is open source, might be enough to put them in the number one spot.