Between e-mail, tweets, news feeds, FriendFeeds, Facebook updates and a barrage of other messages, you've probably got a lot of conversations to track and sort through. Mozilla thinks the web browser might be able to help make sense of it all.
As part of the ongoing Mozilla Labs project, the company has released Snowl, a new plugin designed to help you keep track of and participate in online discussions – regardless of where they're happening and what delivery system they pass through.
The idea behind Snowl is that there's a common thread between our seemingly separate online conversations – they're conversations – and ultimately is shouldn't matter where the messages originate. As Mozilla says, "they're alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources." Snowl's goal is the bring them all together in one place – the browser.
Unfortunately Snowl currently only supports two message sources: RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. When limited to RSS and Twitter, Snowl doesn't offer many advantages over Google Reader or similar services, but if Snowl reaches its loft goals, it may well change the way you use your browser.
For now though, you'll have to make do with some imagination. One very nice feature I did like is the ability to browse through Twitter messages by person, something I can't do with my Twitter feed in Google Reader.
Snowl's standout feature is that it offers two different browsing interfaces. The first is a traditional three-pane window like your average desktop mail app. Presumably this is where you would read potentially import stuff like email, key RSS feeds and the like.
The second interface is a "river of news" view that looks a bit like a newspaper. Built on some of Dave Winer's ideas, the river of news view is designed for quickly scanning through casual messages – your Twitter friends and perhaps eventually Facebook feeds and more.
Differentiating the two views sounds like a great idea, however, in practice the river of news view was somewhat ugly and felt clumsy. Of course Snowl is still highly experimental and definitely has a few quirks and bugs to work out (if you don't see the river of news view right away, refresh the page and it should load). Warning: Snowl doesn't play nice with Google Reader, the two created some sort of reloading loop that crashed Firefox repeatedly until I closed the Google Reader tab.
However, despite being an early and very rough prototype, Snowl definitely has potential. If and when Snowl can handle other forms of data – email, SMS, Chat, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc – it's not hard to see how it could end up changing the way you use your browser.
If you'd like to take it for a spin, you can download Snowl from the Firefox Add-on site (registration is required for experimental add-ons).
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