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[excerpt]A couple of days ago David Ascher, CEO-Designate for Mail & Communications Subsidiary at Mozilla Foundation, announced on his blog the official launch of Mozilla Messaging, a new entity of Mozilla Foundation, focused on integrated messaging and communication.

The main goal of the new group is developing the new version of Thunderbird, that should be much more than an email client only.[/excerpt]

In the short term we will see many improvements such as:

integrated calendaring (building on the great work done by the Mozilla Calendar team and their Lightning add-on to Thunderbird),
better search facilities,
easier configuration,
and a set of other user interface improvements.

Besides, a longer term vision of Thunderbird can include new ways of interaction, according to what users really want:

It is worthwhile considering what the right user experience could be for someone using multiple email addresses, multiple instant messaging systems, IRC, reading and writing on blogs, using VoIP, SMS, and the like. What parts of those interactions make sense to integrate, and where

Nowadays, I think that a full-featured social-oriented messaging and communication platform has to be considered as something that users are looking forward to. I think of a plugin-based platform with the ability to get updated information from major social networks, to publish blog posts, read RSS and a complete integration of VoIP and messaging services. From this standpoint, Flock is doing really well, even if it still lacks in terms of performance and no VoIP yet.

As many of you may know, my company’s labs released two extensions that became quickly popular with users of Thunderbird and Firefox. The ability to access your preferred VoIP service from within the browser or your email client taking advantage of the full integration with the tools you use everyday has been the driver that led to over 21.000+ users who downloaded it. Not a huge number, but it’s a lab product that we don’t promote, aside from this blog (neither in the traditional Mozilla Channels).

To be precise:

June 2006: we made Slashdot, 8000 downloads in a couple of days
2006 total: 12.600 downloads
2007 total: 5736 downloads
2008 to date: 3054 downloads

As you can see, our move to open the Firefox VoIP extension to any SIP provider led to a interesting increase of downloads, with a run rate of around 25.000 for 2008.

I look forward to watching the developments of the Mozilla Messaging platform very closely and, who knows, being involved too.

david ascher, luca filigheddu, mozilla messaging