There's never been so much information so easily available in the history of mankind but this deluge of data coming our way from all directions is getting harder and harder to manage. The need for a better system of organizing all the different sources is very apparent but, so far, there hasn't been anything close to solving it. Mozilla though wants to take a crack at it and the organization's Messaging arm, the one responsible for Thunderbird, is launching a new project that aims to bring together different communications methods and content sources in a smart way.

“Raindrop is an effort that starts by trying to understand today’s web of conversations, and aims to design an interface that helps people get a handle on their digital world. At the same time, it creates a programming interface (API) that helps designers and developers extend our work and create new systems on top of that data. We aren’t trying to invent new protocols or build new messaging systems, rather focusing on building a product that lets users get a handle on the systems we already use.” the Raindrop development team wrote in a lengthy post describing the new tool.

This is somewhat similar to Mozilla's existing project Snowl, but with a much broader scope. The project is very much at the early stages and is far from ready for public consumption yet. Raindrop isn't a new communication tool, there are too many of those already; instead it will aggregate all of the sources, like email, Twitter, Facebook etc., and then sort them based on their authors and their importance.

The idea is to try and separate the personal messages, the actual conversations, from the bulk of notifications, updates and all types of emails that clutter up your inbox. Because of the current chronological approach to email, important messages get buried under the constant stream of emails from all sorts of services and sites. But Raindrop isn't just another email client, it will also gather messages from other communication platforms, Twitter, blog comments, etc., and will sort those as well.

With Twitter for example, it will separate the direct messages and the replies from the rest of the stream just like with email. Raindrop isn't available to the users just yet, but developers or really determined users can follow the instructions here to install the early builds. For the moment though there isn't that much to see but if it can deliver on its promise, Raindrop could become one of the most important and popular tools available today.