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Much of Google’s success rests on the fact that the words “Google” and “suck” rarely appear in the same sentence.

There is one notable exception: Google Groups, which lately has started to look more and more like an abandoned service. The mailing-list and discussion-board service has remained short on features since Google launched it in 2001. Meanwhile, Groups has become overwhelmed with spam, and one the most popular Google Groups — the JQuery mailing list, with more than 20,000 members — is jumping ship.

John Resig, the lead developer of JQuery, a popular JavaScript Library for developing complex web applications, recently posted a sharply critical look at Google Groups.

“As far as I’m concerned, Google Groups is dead,” he writes.

Resig isn’t the only one with problems. Google Groups began life as a way to rescue the Deja.com Usenet archive, but as our Epicenter blog recently reported, the Usenet portion of Google Groups is fundamentally broken. Google has since addressed some problems highlighted in that piece, but even newly created groups, like the JQuery group, feel neglected and overrun with spam.

While Resig is careful to note that Google Groups remains a workable optionfor private mailing lists, but for large public mailing lists like JQuery, Google Groups’ inability to combat spam, its poor moderator tools and general neglect have made the platform unusable.

“The problem mostly lies in the use cases that we’re trying to support,” Resig says in an e-mail to Webmonkey. “We need to support people who are actively trying to help new users, and we also need to support people who just want a simple question answered.” Spam, awkward filtering tools and a lack of support have driven JQuery to look elsewhere for a platform that connects its users, he says.

From an end-user point of view, the problem might not be immediately noticeable, especially if you’re using a good e-mail client which can filter out the spam for you. However, it can be a bit shocking to visit your favorite Groups’ homepage and discover it’s been overrun by spammers.

While Gmail is good at filtering spam, Google Groups is so bad, it’s almost as if the company isn’t even trying. There is a moderation option, which helps a bit. For example, compare the Django Users Group homepage (which uses moderation) to the EveryBlock Group (which doesn’t use moderation). As you can see, there isn’t one legitimate message on the Everyblock Group homepage, while there’s hardly any spam in the Django Group.

Sadly, as Resig points out, moderation makes joining and posting to a Google Group much more complex for the first-time users who have come seeking help, and the tools provided for moderators aren’t nearly as slick as you’d expect from a Google product.

Compounding the problem, spammers have figured out that spoofing e-mail addresses works swimmingly in Google Groups. So even with moderation turned on, spam will inevitably get through. Even worse, it’ll look like it came from legitimate list members, or even the moderators. In the end, the moderators have to moderate their own e-mail addresses to truly stop Google Groups spam.

Resig tells Webmonkey that JQuery is still looking for a suitable replacement for Google Groups. The top contenders are Vanilla Forums, which allows people to subscribe to all new posts and comments by e-mail, and Stack Exchange, which is essentially Stack Overflow customized for a specific topic.

Unfortunately, based on Resig’s account, it looks like Google’s Data Liberation Front hasn’t trained its data-export vision on Groups just yet — there is no way to export all the messages from a Group (there is, however, the ability to export a list of all members). In the JQuery Group’s case, that means some 120,000 messages in the group will have to exported by hand.

As for the future of Google Groups, well, the handwriting might well be on the wall. As blogger and former Yahoo engineer Andy Baio points out, “If you want to know which areas of big companies are being ignored, watch for spam taking over.”

See Also:

• Pack Up Your Data and Leave Whenever You Want, It’s the New Rule of the Cloud
• Google Begins Fixing Usenet Archive
• Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles (UPDATED)

A burning question that’s been tossed around for years — “Why isn’t Firefox on my phone?” — has finally been answered.

Firefox will begin showing up on mobile devices at the end of this year. I got the chance to test a beta version of Firefox on a pre-release mobile device. The browser, code-named Fennec, is the closest thing yet to a real, desktop-class browser for mobiles.

It does almost everything Firefox on the desktop does, and with the speed, stability and support for web standards one would expect from a browser branded with the Firefox name.

Last week, Wired.com received a Nokia N900 for review. The black, brick-style phone has a touchscreen and a physical keyboard. It runs Maemo, Nokia’s operating system based on Debian Linux, and Maemo has its own, dedicated build of Fennec. I installed Fennec for Maemo Beta 4, the latest stable release, and spent a few days surfing with it.

All the features that endear us to Firefox — tabbed browsing, the smart URL bar, easy bookmarking and history management, spellchecker, password manager, an innovative user interface — are present and working properly. There are still some sticky bugs, but it’s already very usable.

While the mobile web of just a few years ago was clunky, slow and unsatisfying, today’s mobile web is a whole new bag. The iPhone’s Mobile Safari and Google’s Android browser (both based on the same open source WebKit engine), along with the Opera Mobile browser are feature-rich tiny machines. Mobile bandwidth is still limited, but fast enough and getting faster. Cities are blanketed in Wi-Fi hotspots. Flash support is incomplete, but improving quickly. Most of us can see the light at the end of the tunnel when we won’t need the desktop for all but the most serious tasks.

Mozilla has remained largely absent from this revolution until now. Firefox will first be made available for devices running Windows Mobile and Maemo. Later, a version is expected for Android. There won’t be a version of Firefox for the BlackBerry, for Symbian or for the iPhone any time soon, (Mozilla execs get asked the iPhone question all the time, and their answer is always the same — Apple’s restrictions on the device are too tight for Mozilla’s browser to be able to function properly).

Performance is what this browser will be judged on, and at least on the N900, the Fennec team should expect high marks. Pages load very quickly and I encountered few rendering problems in my tests. I hit all my usual destinations: Gmail, Google Reader, Craigslist, Wired, Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. Of course, I followed scores of links out to other sites.

Since it’s built on the same code as Firefox (actually, it’s based on Firefox 3.6 code, which hasn’t even made it to the desktop yet), Fennec has excellent support for web standards, Ajax, microformats and for advanced CSS layouts. Flash support is coming soon. The latest nightly builds have it, but it’s buggy — Mozilla’s QA blog notes there are syncing issues with audio and video. The beta I used didn’t have Flash capability.

The N900’s screen is touch-sensitive, so double-tapping on an image or paragraph of text zooms in cleanly without a page refresh. You can see the page element get sharper as you zoom in — just like the iPhone’s browser. Text flows cleanly around images and hardly ever spills out of bounding boxes.

One notable flaw in Fennec is that words often appear a little crushed. Most sites I visited showed kerning and letter spacing issues (Wired.com is one example). On a few sites (like Craigslist) text showed up perfectly fine. Results varied on the rest. These inconsistencies are probably due to a combination of the text styling the website author has chosen and the fact that most sites don’t yet know what to do with Fennec’s user-agent string — the bit of code identifying it as a mobile browser. Websites will serve mobile-optimized sites to mobile browsers, which is why you’ll sometimes get redirected to a different URL or served bigger text when you hit some websites with your iPhone or BlackBerry.

Fennec is such an unknown entity on the web that most sites don’t know it’s a mobile browser. Leading up to launch, we’ll see more sites recognizing it for what it is — a browser running on a tiny screen.

One fix is to install an add-on that lets you change the user-agent string and impersonate a more widely-used mobile browser (this is called “spoofing”), but such an add-on doesn’t exist yet. Visiting the page for the most popular user-agent spoofer for Firefox shows at least one fan has already requested a Fennec version.

Thankfully, Fennec’s page-rendering problems are largely contained to text kerning and spacing. But it gets worse when you zoom in. There’s already a bug report filed for the kerning issues, and they should be fixed before 1.0 arrives.

The only other notable problem is page sluggishness when scrolling. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the page is fully loaded, whether it’s weighed down with JavaScript, or whether you’re using the keypad or your finger. Fennec is an equal-opportunity page sluggifier.

One Mozilla engineer I e-mailed says the team has been trying to get rid of one of the browser’s visual tics — a slight, side-to-side “jitter” that sometimes happens when you place your finger on the screen to drag it — and that the fix they’ve applied has inadvertently caused the sluggishness to show up in this beta. It should improve in the next beta release.

Beyond performance, the next most critical ingredient for a browser is a well-designed user interface. Fennec has one.

Just as with Firefox’s “Awesome bar,” the Fennec address bar does triple-duty — it’s a URL bar, a Google search box and a history and bookmarks search tool. Results are suggested as you type, and on the N900, it’s snappy.

Swiping the page left or right exposes two additional banks of controls. Swipe to the right and you get a tab manager. It shows thumbnails of all your open browser tabs and a big plus sign you use to open a new tab.

Swipe to the left and you get forward and back controls, the Star button to mark a page as a favorite and a button that brings up the Settings panel.

Hiding these elements just beyond the edges of the page saves as much screen real estate as possible for the web page itself without sacrificing the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect from a modern browser. It’s an innovative twist.

Inside the Settings panel you get an add-on manager, a downloads manager, a control panel for toggling how Fennec handles scripts and images by default. (Look closely — the description for the “Enable JavaScript” box says “Makes websites flashy” and the one for “Enable Plug-ins” says “Makes websites annoying.”) This panel is also where you can choose to save passwords or cookies and where you clear your browser cache.

There are a few Fennec add-ons to be found at addons.mozilla.org/mobile. The best ones to try right now are GeoGuide, which shows photos, events and weather for your current location, and Mozilla’s own Weave, which syncs your bookmarks, history, passwords, and tabs between Fennec and your desktop versions of Firefox.

Mobile Firefox will be the first mobile browser with a real add-on architecture. That’s exciting, but there still aren’t very many add-ons for Fennec available. The release candidate stage (once it’s out of beta) is when many Firefox add-on authors will complete the process of adapting their desktop versions to work with Fennec. Meanwhile, Mozilla is waving the start flag — Thursday’s issue of its about:mobile newsletter is aimed squarely at mobilizing mobile add-on developers.

With GeoGuide and Weave installed, Fennec is remarkably stable. In three days of testing, Fennec didn’t crash once, and this is pre-release software. I can’t say the same about Mobile Safari, which has been around for a couple of years and still crashes at least once or twice per day.

Even though they’re not perfect, the Webkit browsers for the iPhone and Android have set expectations very high for mobile browsers. Scrolling on multi-touch devices like the iPhone and the new Droid is smooth and intuitive. There are a slew of new Android phones coming out this fall, and enhancements to the Android’s browser in the recent Eclair release give it new abilities. It includes support for multi-touch screen gestures, native video playback and expanded support for HTML5 elements that make JavaScript-heavy websites like Gmail and Facebook faster and more comfortable to use.

This is the arena Fennec will be entering when it’s released later this year. At this stage, it looks like it will be a success — at least on devices where it actually runs.

Note: We couldn’t get the N900 to take good screenshots, so the screenshots shown here are from a Maemo emulator running on Mac OS X.

See Also:

• Android Gets a Better Browser, Now With More HTML5
• Mozilla Readies Windows 7 Support for Firefox 3.6
• Mozilla’s Weave Ties Your Desktop and Your Personal Web Together
• Fennec Firefox In The Wings

Android got a boost Tuesday when Google announced its Android SDK now supports version 2.0 of the open-source platform for mobiles.

There’s a whole mess of new features in Android 2.0 (aka “Eclair”) but the big news for Webmonkeys is the enhanced WebKit-powered browser.

The Android browser gets an updated UI — tap the address bar for instant searches, double-tap to zoom in on content wells — and better bookmarks that incorporate thumbnail images of the pages.

Also included is support for several of HTML5’s APIs for building next-gen web apps: the Geolocation API, the Database API for managing client-side SQL databases and data caching support for offline application access.

There’s also support for HTML5’s <video> tag — the browser can play videos in fullscreen mode without plug-ins.

Read about the enhancements at the Android Developers blog, where the Eclair update was announced. There’s also a page listing all the highlights found within.

And there’s this sexy video:

See Also:

• Android Developers Get Ready For Cupcake Release
• Google Delivers Android Mobile OS to Developers
• Meet Android, the Google Phone’s Robot Brain

Google has added a new social-search tool to its experimental search options.

Google Social Search, which went live Monday afternoon, finds results from your social network, pulls a list of your contacts from sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, Google Reader and other social networks, as well as your Gmail contacts, to find results for search terms from people you know.

Facebook’s friend data isn’t shared publicly, so results from your Facebook friends won’t show up unless you’re also friends on other networks.

To enable the new experiment, head over to the Google Experimental Search page and add the new Social Search option. As with other experiments, you’ll need to be logged in to Google to see the social results.

Once the experiment is enabled, you’ll be able to search for something like “potato chips” with enhanced results. Along with the regular Google results showing top hits for the entire web, you’ll see a link to a write-up about potato chips from your friend’s food blog, as well. You might also see a friend’s tweet about potato chips, or a link to a Yelp review written by somebody you know where they talked about how good the potato chips are at the Lulu Petite sandwich shop.

While Google’s intro video (embedded below) shows search results from the social tool inline with other results (under the heading “Results from people in your social circle…”) that didn’t happen in our testing. To see the personalized results from our social graph we had to click the “Options” button and then filter the results by “social.”

As for the results, well, Social Search leaves a little to be desired, but the results depend heavily on how large your social circle is and how closely your interests match your friends. For example, a search for “Webmonkey” turned up a number of hits, since the past and present Webmonkey staff members are part of our social graph. However, two of us have been passing around a link to a (NSFW) McSweeney’s article about decorative gourds Tuesday morning, but a social search for “decorative gourds” returned nothing from our social graph. We seem to be alone on that one.

It’s important to note that Google Social Search is not a real-time search engine. The quality of results may suffer a little if you’re searching for things that your friends have only started posting about very recently.

The quality of results will also depend on how many services you’ve added to your Google Profile — the more social sites Google knows you hang out on, the more friends it has to draw on, and thus the more results you’ll see.

The exclusion of Facebook may seem like an egregious oversight, but it comes amidst a very public battle between Google and Facebook to become your hub on the social web. The recent push behind Google Profiles was the search company’s first major attempt to create a central place for you to store information about yourself and link to your profiles on other social networks. But Facebook is still the more popular place to build a profile, and Facebook struck a deal with Microsoft last week to let the Bing search engine index user activity on the site — a deal Google was left out of.

Compared to using the search features on social sites themselves, like Twitter and FriendFeed, Google’s Social Search comes in a distant second. But it does offer the advantage of finding everything in one place. It also acts as a very welcome filter. Try searching for “Where the Wild Things Are” on Twitter, and you’ll see thousands of tweets from people commenting about the movie or the book. Run the same search in Google Social Search, and you’ll just see what your friends — and the people they chat with publicly — are saying.

All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is already available publicly on the web — with a bit of Google hacking you could find it yourself. But what’s social about that?

To see Social Search in action, check out this video from Google:

To enable Social Search, make sure you’re logged in to your Google account and head over to the Experimental Search page.

See Also:

• Google Gets Faster, Less Spammy With Revamped Search Engine
• Use Google Experimental Search Features Today
• Google Experimental: Keyboard Navigation For Search Results

Facebook has made two major changes to the way it displays real-time data about user activity on its platform — one for publishers to help track the spread viral content, and one change that affects how people see updates from their friends.

The site has enhanced its Share feature — the tiny “Share this on Facebook” widgets seen at the bottom of blog posts, videos and photos — to include live stats tracking. Starting Monday, publishers can see a live count of how many times a particular post or piece of media has been shared on Facebook.

The new live stats counter for Facebook Share closely mimics Tweetmeme’s popular “Retweet” badges, or the live widgets that show the number of Diggs or up-votes on Reddit a piece of content has accumulated.

Facebook Share is getting some analytics tools, too. In addition to learning how many times Facebook users have shared a post, publishers can also see whenever somebody “likes” the shared post, leaves a comment, or clicks back to the original site from within Facebook.

It’s not the only tweak to Facebook’s real-time data flow the company has made to its site within the last few days.

On Friday, the Facebook home page for logged-in users was redesigned to show a filtered stream of updates. Rather than just showing a stream of every status update, every post and every “like” from within their network, Facebook users can now choose between a streamlined, filtered view and a raw, unfiltered view.

This change basically incorporates the old “Highlights” feed — the most important posts from your friends — into the main News Feed. The result is a stream of the most interesting or important stuff that’s been posted within the past couple of days.

The new filtered News Feed is now the default. The more times a post is commented on or liked, the more “popular” it becomes. An algorithm determines what goes into the feed and what stays hidden. The old “Highlights” box is being removed, as it’s now redundant.

The Live Feed, which can be accessed by clicking on the new “Live Feed” tab at the top of the home page, gives a more immediate, Twitter-like stream. It displays all of the recent activity, posts and updates from you and your friends, regardless of popularity.

The odd thing here is that one of these changes brings Facebook up to speed with its competitors in the real-time content sharing game, while the other change sets it back.

Publishers want to know how their content is doing out in the wild, so the new Share tools make sense.

But in altering the News Feed in the way it has, Facebook actually becomes less of a real-time news source for its users. By adding popularity filters, important stuff might not bubble up into your News Feed for hours or days. I just looked at my News Feed, and the newest item is four hours old. If I really want to know what my friends are doing, reading, liking and talking about right now, I have to switch over to the Live Feed. Luckily, this is as easy as one mouse click.

But what does this say about the proliferation of real-time data streams on the web? Publishers always want better real-time data, but do users? Are regular people by and large tired of the massive firehose of updates their favorite sites now all offer? Is it all becoming just too much?

If so, Facebook made the right move with the News Feed changes. If not, hey, there’s always the Live Feed option one click away. Or there’s Twitter. And if you want a real-time stream you can filter even more minutely, you can turn to FriendFeed or Cliqset or Plaxo Pulse.

If the changes to Facebook’s stream bothers you — and judging from the comments of my own Facebook friends, the changes aren’t being seen as that friendly — they are easy to alter. Facebook Insider has an excellent post showing how to change your feed settings. Additional tips are in the comments.

See Also:

• Bing Is in Your Facebook, Indexing Your Status
• Let’s Be Friends: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
• Facebook Cracks, Here Come the Apps

Web comic xkcd is sporting a fresh redesign Monday morning, paying tribute to the free web-hosting service GeoCities. Yahoo, which bought GeoCities in 1999 for $3.5 billion dollars, is shutting down the service today after ten years of stewardship.

GeoCities was a place anyone could start a website for free. The company sold cheap banner advertising against your content, but that didn’t matter — you finally had a place to post that Melissa Joan Hart fanpage or your fully-annotated Art Alexakis discography.

In the web’s early days, you actually had to know how to author a web page in order to publish anything on the internet. You had to have working knowledge of things like HTML, FTP, GIF and DNS. For people with these new-found skills, a GeoCities page was an essential first step into the web, a rite of passage. Next came the easy authoring tools like Dreamweaver and Blogger, then the social networks like Friendster and MySpace, which let anyone establish a web presence with a few clicks of the mouse. GeoCities, along with other free hosting communities like Angelfire, faded into obscurity.

Many of those early pages survived in all their gaudy, glitzy glory — complete with scrolling banners, animated Gifs and blink tags.

Until Monday, October 26, 2009. Rest in peace, GeoCities.

See Also:

• Geocities, Identity and the Problem With Disappearing Web Services

In an e-mail sent to the public-html@w3.org mailing list on Wednesday, Microsoft’s Eliot Graf proposed removing the Canvas element, which is used to create complex vector animations in the browser without plug-ins, from the HTML5 specification. Graf also proposed launching a new, separate specification for the Canvas 2D API.

His e-mail:

In his mail describing why he created a separate Canvas 2D API specification, Doug Schepers wrote [1]:

> There is a chance that currently Canvas could be a blocker on progress
> for the HTML5 spec, and at this point, Canvas is so widely implemented
> that I don’t think it’s at risk, so I hope this isn’t disruptive. I am
> available to help with any editing that needs doing, but I hope that
> others will also work with this draft, and step into the editor role.

At Microsoft, we agree with the sentiments expressed by Doug, Maciej [2], and others about creating a separate Canvas 2D API specification. [3] We are prepared to offer editorial resources to aid in the completion of this separate specification. We have looked over Doug’s initial document, made some editorial enhancements, and are prepared to follow through in taking feedback and maintaining the specification.

We believe that some sort of accessibility API functionality is needed in the canvas element. However, the exact nature and depth of that functionality presents a dilemma that may block progress on the HTML5 spec. We also think that the Canvas 2D API may be a desirable feature used in other technologies such as SVG.

Starting with Doug Schepers’ initial draft, we made changes to get the document to adhere to the W3C PubRules [4], enhance readability, and improve logical flow of the document. In addition, we foresee adding sample code throughout the specification, where appropriate. No normative changes have been made. As with all drafts, the Canvas 2D API specification is still a work in progress. We would like to solicit feedback about the changes that were made (see below TODO) and about further changes that the working group would like to see.

Our updated version is published at http://dev.w3.org/html5/canvas-api/canvas-2d-api.html.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-canvas-api/2009JulSep/0002.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-canvas-api/2009JulSep/0007.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Aug/0628.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/2005/07/pubrules

[…]

Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only modern browser with no plans to support Canvas — Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all do. Redmond’s opposition makes sense, as the animation capabilities Canvas provides would conflict with Microsoft’s plans to speed adoption of its Silverlight platform, which affords web authors many of the same capabilities using a proprietary plug-in and commercial development software.

Several list members pointed out that if Microsoft has the resources to author the spec independent of HTML5, those resources could be better spent building support for Canvas into the browser.

A follow-up response from Ian Hickson, a Google employee who is the primary editor of the HTML5 spec, points out a few clear problems with this strategy and stresses that it doesn’t seem list a good idea:

IF we’re going to split out the 2D API — and I’m not really sure if at this point that’s something we should do, frankly — then I would much rather we do it based on the text in the HTML5 spec now, and would much rather we have an editor who is able to give this the full-time attention that it needs.

However, I’m really not sure at this point that it even makes sense to extract the API anymore. The API intergrates pretty tightly with the rest of HTML, for example it refers to HTMLVideoElements, the HTML5 “structured clone” feature is defined in terms of canvas interfaces, and so on. There would have to be a two-way reference, which would be a maintenance nightmare, and which would just delay the progress of both documents.

What are the problems that we are trying to solve by splitting out the API at this point?

The whole thread, which is still growing, can be viewed here.

What do you think? What’s Microsoft up to?

Mozilla Labs has debuted a new web-based tool for integrating all your online communications — such as e-mail, Twitter, Skype and Facebook — into a single browser window. It uses a series of intelligent filters to highlight what’s important to you, bringing the conversations with people or updates from services you care about the most to the top, and keeping the stuff that can wait out of sight until you’re ready to look at it.

It’s called Raindrop, and it fetches all of your communications from different sources like mail servers, Twitter and RSS feeds. Then, Raindrop intelligently surfaces the “important parts,” giving them priority and allowing you to reply or interact with the communications inside your web browser. Like all Mozilla projects, Raindrop is open-source software — it’s actually a mini web server that you run locally and access through your browser. At the time of Thursday’s launch, Firefox, Safari and Chrome are supported, with Internet Explorer notably absent from the list.

While Raindrop is rough around the edges in this early release, Mozilla is hoping to build a one-stop communication platform that will give you a single place to view all your messages, e-mail, shared photos and other social tools.

The “intelligent” part of Raindrop would allow, for example, direct messages and @replies from Twitter to be highlighted over regular incoming messages not directed specifically to you. E-mails that come in can be sorted to give priority to messages from your closest friends, replies and active threads you’re participating in. The idea is to make Raindrop a people-centric communication tool that emphasizes your friends over mailing lists, rote announcements and other not-quite-spam messages.

That might sound a bit like Google Wave, which is also trying to re-imagine web-based communication from the ground up. But while Raindrop and Wave share some similar features, including the ability to view images and videos inline, Google Wave is a much more radical departure from the status quo. Raindrop is more familiar, since it essentially melds a few things you’re already using — an e-mail inbox, a Twitter client and an RSS reader — into a singular, streamlined interface. Raindrop is also similar to Mozilla Lab’s existing Snowl project, which puts a river of news and e-mail messages in Firefox. But unlike Snowl, which is a Firefox plugin, Raindrop is a standalone system that even features an API that will allow developers to build their own add-ons, extending Raindrop as they see fit.

So, Raindrop will only gain functionality over time through widgets, add-ons and media-specific enhancements for services like YouTube and Flickr. In that sense, Raindrop could be seen as a logical extension of where Google has been taking Gmail recently by letting users add widgets for chat, calendar, RSS updates and other communication tools to Gmail’s browser-based inbox.

At the moment, Raindrop is a developer release, which means there’s no installer to download. The Labs team is making a downloadable installer one of its top priorities for the project. Interested developers can check out the code and run the startup script manually (see the Mozilla wiki for details). It’s not a plug-in or a desktop client — once Raindrop reaches the packaged installer stage, you’d set it up and then visit a local URL to see your messages.

I was able to install the developer code with no problems on my local machine. After telling Raindrop my Gmail and Twitter account info, the script dutifully fetched my messages.

Raindrop’s overview of your Inbox. Click the image for a larger view.

As you can see in the image above, Raindrop retains Gmail’s threaded conversation view, however, in this case Raindrop failed to filter out a message from a local wine shop, which, while not spam, is nevertheless not something I would want prioritized.

Still, Raindrop is clearly a work in progress and despite not being perfect, it did do a pretty good job of filtering out less important conversations.

Raindrop inline e-mail and Twitter messages. Click the image for a larger view.

As you can see, Twitter updates are shown inline with e-mail threads. Other messages, like mailing list subscriptions, are filtered out of the main conversation flow and given their own boxes so you can see what’s new without fully disrupting your more personal communications.

At the moment, any filtering or message deleting in Raindrop does not appear to sync back to your mail server. This is a serious flaw that we expect will be addressed before Raindrop reaches the downloadable stage.

This early developer release of Raindrop isn’t much to look at yet. But I should note that Mozilla has already spun out a new design that looks a bit more like Snowl:

Raindrop’s newer interface (image courtesy of Mozilla). Click the image for a larger view.

The newer look is a bit cleaner and abandons the traditional e-mail-style layout in favor of something more free-flowing.

Raindrop is clearly still very experimental and not meant for even casual usage, but we’re looking forward to seeing where Mozilla Labs takes the project.

Wrapping your head around Raindrop is difficult to do without actually using it and, due to the lack of an installer, using it is beyond most users at this point. Thankfully, Mozilla has posted this video which gives you nice overview of how Raindrop works.

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

See Also:

• Google Invites Everyone to Catch Its Real-Time Wave
• Mozilla’s ‘Snowl’ May Eventually Change the Way You Browse the Web
• Mozilla Revamps Labs Site, Reminds Us Weave Exists
• Mozilla’s Chris Beard on the Future of Firefox and Online Services

Click on the image above (or here) to see the video Google just posted to YouTube to promote its new theme library for the Google Chrome browser. The themes, which are designed to give your browser’s skin a splash of color and personality, were developed by famous artists and designers.

The video in the link shows some of them off, but be sure to watch until the end, when the browser skin literally explodes out of the video frame and takes over the page. Once the video is over, there’s more cool page-skinning trickery to be had — the video player window turns into a theme browser you can click through, altering the design of the YouTube page itself.

Chrome is only available now in stable form for Windows users. Mac and Linux versions are still in development and will be finalized later this year.

Google first began developing themes for Chrome in August, as we noted in a previous report. Firefox has a similar theming architecture for its browser called Personas, which you can explore at Mozilla’s dedicated Personas site.

See Also:

• Google Chrome Is Growing Up, Slowly but Surely
• Chrome Hits 3.0, Mac Version Due Later This Year

Facebook’s Twitter envy is showing again; the site recently announced a deal with Microsoft that will see public Facebook statuses indexed by a search engine for the first time. Although users sticking with Facebook’s default privacy settings won’t be affected, the move clearly shows Facebook moving beyond its closed, walled-garden beginnings.

Twitter’s success has clearly shaped several of Facebook’s recent changes, including the move to real-time updates and the acquisition of FriendFeed, but this latest development — turning over Facebook’s walled data to a search engine — goes well beyond earlier moves.

Part of Facebook’s appeal for many is precisely its walled-garden aspect. Sharing information on Facebook is a much more private, limited experience than with public services like Twitter, where anyone, friend or otherwise can see what you post. But Facebook’s new deal with Bing, which comes close on the heals of Bing’s similar indexing plan for Twitter, will change that.

If the idea of your status messages finding their way into search engine indexes fills you with horror, there’s no need for alarm, only Facebook profiles set to “everyone” will be indexed. Since changing your privacy settings to “everyone” requires a trip to Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Profile, presumably only those that truly want their profiles public will be affected.

Facebook’s own terms of service also prevent outside applications from caching any user data, which means Bing’s indexing will likely be very ephemeral — don’t expect deep time-based searches or cached pages.

So if most users stick with the default privacy settings and Bing can’t cache the results, who does benefit from the new deal?

Earlier this year, Facebook announced “fan pages” for products and brands that wanted a presence on the site, but for whom a traditional account would not have worked. It’s precisely this segment of Facebook’s population that will likely be most excited about the new Bing search deal. Brands and celebrity users already heavily invested in a Facebook presence will see that presence now available to the world at large thanks to Bing’s indexing plan.

At the moment the Facebook integration is just an announcement, but if the end result is anything like the Twitter integration in Bing (which is already live), expect the focus to be on links and whatever the buzzwords of the moment happen to be.

How much value Facebook’s status updates will add to Bing’s search results remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure, Bing finally has some data Google doesn’t. Unlike Wednesday’s Bing/Twitter deal, which was quickly mirrored by a similar announcement from Google, thus far, Facebook and Google have shown each other no love.

See Also:

• Let’s Be Friends: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
• Epicenter: Facebook Redesigns, Puts Emphasis on Sharing
• Facebook Opens Up Publisher - Now Go Tell Everyone
• Facebook Moves Into Twitter Territory