Mozilla Raindrop and Google Wave Totally Unrelated

First, everyone was waiting with baited breath for Google to release Wave. Google Wave was supposed to be the solution for all of our messaging and social media needs. It would replace FriendFeed, email, Twitter, Facebook, shrink Kanye’s ego, and solve world hunger. Once those few elite who got invites started to use it, we all realized it was no such solution. It’s a collaborative communication protocol and is not very well suited to replace your favorite social network just yet. It’s not even suitable to replace you email. Some might even go so far as to say it’s a solution looking for a problem, which would explain the many posts floating around about use cases for Google Wave.

Now, Mozilla announces the release of Raindrop. Let’s get something straight from jump: the two have just about nothing to do with each other except that they deal with communication and have names related to water. I’m not sure why everyone wants to mention them in the same breath. While Google Wave is a communications protocol, Mozilla Raindrop is actually a communications aggregator. It’s goal is two-fold:

1. To aggregate all of your messages from across all of your inboxes on various services in one place
2. To organize those messages in such a way that that email from Mom is given higher priority than your umpteenth invitation to play Mafia Wars

Currently, you need an invite to get into Google Wave and you access it via your browser. To get into Mozilla Raindrop, you have to download it, compile it, and run it on your own system. You still access it via the browser, but it’s really more of an application than a 3rd part service. Your stuff is all stored on your own computer.

To review, comparing Google Wave directly to Mozilla Raindrop is like comparing a single book (Wave) to an entire library (Raindrop). Both projects are still young, though. I’m quite positive that they will mature and converge in some way. For instance, Raindrop developers could create a module that pulls in updates to your Waves. The Google Wave team could create modules to import your social activity and email accounts (although, Wave’s interface might make this difficult to deal with).

Either way it goes, I’m hoping these projects and others like them will help to change the way we message each other online. Email and inboxes in general are inefficient and annoying to deal with. How long have you had those hundreds of emails just sitting in there because you don’t feel like dealing with them? Between Wave and Raindrop, maybe we will start seeing our inboxes work for us instead of against us.