Mozillian

When the Mozilla first released the in-browser messaging/content aggregation client, it was the best with its cool looking logo and the idea was the best. However, the new version is just been released and it is also more cooler then the previous version. The new version, Snowl 0.2 supports both incoming and outgoing messages from Twitter, and features a much better looking “river of news” view.

Although the guys from the Mozilla is claiming that the intention for Snowl is to be all encompassing, currently its only capabilities are reading feeds and Tweets. The subscriber to an RSS feed or connect to Twitter by feeding Snowl your username and password and your feeds show up right there in your browser in the view of your choice:

The River view
In this view, a slim left hand column will appear in your browser window listing the people you follow and shortcuts to websites. The rest of the browser shows the actual content. If you click on a feed or a user’s Twitter icon to display only their material in the main part of the browser or click on the All icon for a smorgasbord of your favorite content.

The Stream view
This view provides shortcuts to your RSS feeds and entire tweets will appear in a slim left hand column in your browser window. The rest of the browser is left for you to surf as you please. A refresh button is also included at the top of the “stream” in case you have a sneaking suspicion that things are going on in your content-verse.

The List view
This view is more like an e-mail client view. Twitter users and feeds listed in the left hand column, titles of each tweet/article in a horizontal column at the top and the main content viewing window in the remaining. On top of the ability to tweet directly from your browser, Snowl offers up little search fields in each view. You know, in case there’s something you want to revisit but the thought of browsing through tons of content for it makes you crazy.

The Principles of Snowl

• People and conversations are first-class objects.
• One single application can satisfy a broad range of users.
• Feeds are a transport format, not a feature.
• Searching option is better than pre-categorization.
• A messaging application is a platform.
• Browser features are very useful for messaging.