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Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Social Software, Browsers

Mozilla updates Snowl social messaging plugin for Firefox

Snowl 0.2
Mozilla has released an update to Snowl, a plugin first released in August, which allows you to track RSS feeds and Twitter updates in your browser without navigating away from the web page you're currently reading.

Version 0.2 includes an updated river view that groups messages together in a single column, and a new stream view that lets you see messages in your sidebar. To be honest, the stream view looks pretty much like sidebar you get from other Twitter Firefox addons lke Twitbin, TwitKit, or TwitterFox. But most of those plugins let you see detailed information about your Twitter messages, like which ones are replies or direct messages. Snowl doesn't.

Still, as you could probably guess from the low version number, Snowl 0.2 is still a work in pogress. And it does have a few nice features, like the ability to send and receive Tweets from multiple Twitter accounts.

Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Social Software, Beta

Mozilla brings Twitter, RSS, other messages to Firefox with Snowl

Snowl
Mozilla released a plugin for Firefox called Snowl yesterday that has the potential to completely change the way you use your web browser. Or it could just frustrate the heck out of you. Here's what it does: it brings messages from various sources (Twitter, RSS feeds, and eventually instant messaging services) to your browser.

The concept is interesting. Why rely on pop up notifications to let you know that you need to switch browser tabs or applications to keep up with conversations on Twitter, FriendFeed, or other locations when you can just see everything on one screen? Snowl lets you browse the web while keeping an eye on all of those conversations.

But the truth of the matter is it just sort of makes a browser screen look crowded. If you've got a 24 inch display, that might not matter. But if you've got a 15 inch, 1024 x 768 display, this is not the plugin for you. Snowl does present a few interesting ways of looking at your messages. There's an Outlook-style 3-pane view with contacts and sources on the left, headlines at the top and full text in the bottom. Or you can use a "river of news" style view that shows a newspaper-like list of updates.

Snowl is still in the early beta stages. Mozilla admits that there are a ton of known bugs, but the developers wanted to see if there was any real interest in the project before continuing. Thus the public release. What do you think? Is Snowl useful or just another distraction?

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