raindrop messaging integration

[Bryan Clark <clarkbw gnome org>]

Hey -

We just announced the release of Raindrop [1] a new messaging system 
we've been working on for a little while now.  I'm announcing to this 
list because I think Raindrop could provide a lot of value to 
gnome-shell as many of the design goals are similar.  It's likely best 
to read the introduction blog entry [2] and look over the limited code 
documentation [3] if you're interested but I'll give the 30 second run 
down here.

Raindrop is being designed as a message system specifically for how 
people communicate in today's web environment; i.e. email, mailing 
lists, twitter, etc.  The system itself is a CouchDB daemon service that 
knows how to pull down your email and twitter (process and index them) 
and then can serve them back as JSON objects.  Raindrop includes a built 
in messaging web application that also gets served from the same place, 
you'll see demos of it in the videos.

We only had the chance to do a couple iterations and are working to 
develop some real web apis [4] which could be useful for integration of 
contacts, messages, and other data Raindrop provides.

I'm not suggesting that gnome-shell pulls in Raindrop today and starts 
using it, we are definitely not ready for that.  I am hoping that 
gnome-shell people will find Raindrop interesting and that we can start 
looking at how we could work with each if it makes sense.

Let me know if there are questions.  I still can't seem to run the shell 
with my thinkpad nvidia card but am looking for another system to try it on.

Cheers,
~ Bryan

[1] http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop/
[2] http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop/2009/10/22/introducing-raindrop/
[3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Raindrop
[4] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Raindrop/WebApis
[*] http://clarkbw.net/blog/2009/10/22/raindrop/