Technical Project Manager, Jason Norton, shares an article he recently came across about how Mozilla looks at the future of messaging...

"The web is an increasingly chatty place. Between following comment threads, checking in with friends on Twitter, reading a few blogs with RSS feeds, and conquering a mountain of e-mail, we have plenty of conversations to keep track of. Mozilla wants to help us on the conversational journey, which is why the company has launched Snowl, a new tool that offers a small glimmer of hope for those seeking communications nirvana.

Announced on the Mozilla Labs blog, the company presents Snowl with a simple question: "Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions?" Snowl has materialized as a prototype Firefox extension based on a few key ideas:

•  It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They're alike, whether they come from traditional e-mail servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.

•  Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones.

•  A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later.

•  Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages.

For its debut, Snowl only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter messaging, and it offers two UIs for reading. The first is a traditional three-pane setup where feeds and Twitter users are organized in a left sidebar, with a message list above the center column and a preview/reading pane below."

The traditional 3-pane list view

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