Raindrop

Mozilla Messaging has announced their new research project, Raindrop. I've been watching the progress of Raindrop as an internal project with interest since joining Mozilla, and I'm very glad that it is now publicly available. Raindrop is an experiment in unified messaging, and in the creation of a platform for messaging applications.

The most interesting aspect of the architecture, to me, is the two-tier extension model. Raindrop is implemented as a back-end and a front-end, and is extensible in both places. Back-end extensions can enable new communication protocols, or perform bulk analysis of the entire message corpus, while front-end extensions can change the user experience. The two can work together to create integrated experiences, or they can work separately.

The application setup and install is a little rough yet, but there's some very interesting ideas in there.