The future direction of Mozilla Thunderbird, and indeed the Mozilla Corporation itself is currently a hot topic of discussion across the web. CEO of the Mozilla Corporation Mitchell Baker sparked the debate with her Email Call to Action, a post which presented two topics to the Thunderbird community - the future of Thunderbird, and the future of email.

The problem, summarised nicely on Mozillazine is the priority placed on Firefox over Thunderbird by the Mozilla Corporation. Whereas the Mozilla Foundation encompasses the whole of Mozilla and all of its projects, the Corporation is responsible for Firefox and Thunderbird only.

The real problem

I believe that the problem extends much further than this, in fact. The community behind Thunderbird is obviously much smaller than Firefox, for which there’s a good reason - novelty. The simple truth is that there is no novelty behind email. Of course Thunderbird has the same excellent plug-in architecture as firefox, and therefore can be extended to do almost anything from the useful calendar integrationg to the novelty of integrated media player control.

However, email isn’t like the web. There’s no email 2.0, with developers doing new and exciting things with the technologies given to them. The explosion of web 2.0 and related technologies doesn’t affect email - and with this statement I include GMail, which is essentially a nice interface to the same old thing.

Teaching old dogs new tricks…

…simply doesn’t apply to email in its current form, and neither to email client applications. Let’s take a look at the different types of email clients and their feature differences.

Email-only

Examples: GMail
The simplest form of email client does just that - sends, retrieves and archives email. GMail is the perfect example of this type of mail client - it does nothing else. Obviously I’m considering the management of an address book or list of contacts an integral part of these operations, and not a feature in its own right.

Email + News

Examples: Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird
Take an email-only client, add newsgroup and/or RSS feed support, and get an Email + News client. While Thunderbird does both, Outlook Express only supports newsgroups. This type of client is perfect for the basic home user, and since Outlook Express is installed on all Windows-XP machines as standard (I’ve no experience with Vista) this isn’t entirely surprising.

Personal Information Manager (PIM)

Examples: Outlook, Evolution
Take an email-only client and pile features onto it - a fully-integrated calendar, to-do list, ’sticky notes’, more complete contact/address book management and a journal to visualise activites over time - what you get is a PIM. Then take a device like a PDA or cellhpone and synchronise this information to take it on the move.

Thunderbird does some things very, very well. Unfortunately they’re also things that most everyday users probably wouldn’t notice, since I’d imagine most people tend to maintain only one email account (I may be wrong here). The thing I love about Thunderbird is that fact that it does IMAP correctly.

Everything about IMAP is horrible in Microsoft Outlook - the delete/expunge process is outdated and frankly unintuitive. I understand that this is how IMAP works, but look at the way the two applications present this functionality to the user - when deleting an email on an IMAP server in Outlook, a striked line appears through it, to show that it’s been marked for deletion, and is ready to be purged or ‘expunged’.

Conversely, Thunderbird moves the email to a ‘virtual’ folder called Trash - this folder isn’t really there, it just makes the process of trashing and then permenantly deleting a mail more intuitive. Such is the problem with outlook - when I delete a mail, I want it gone - out of my way. My eyes shouldn’t have to strain to see an undeleted message in a list of deleted ones. This problem is also true for moving a message to another folder, since moving a message involves making a copy and then deleting the original.

Sending messages is just as much a problem in Outlook - send a message, and it gets stuck in a local ’sent items’ folder that doesn’t move machines with you. Thunderbird, however silently moves it to the Sent folder I’ve set up on my IMAP server without complaint. Outlook can behave this way, but it involves setting up special rules in the Rules and Alerts window in an unusual manner - defining a rule based on which Outlook form was used to create the message. No, really!

What’s needed

What’s needed is a whole new approach to not only email, but collaboration in general. Let’s face it, Microsoft Exchange is good at what it does. Call it bloated, expensive - whatever you will, but nothing compares with its enterprise-level management of people’s time, information and sharing of information.

This is what I believe we need to achieve with email 2.0, something which I believe Baker was implying in the second part of her post - a Broader Mail Initiative. I use Thunderbird on a daily basis, although I’m tied to running Outlook alongside it to syncrhonise to my phone/PDA, and I’d love to see Thunderbird take a more positive, leading role in the space of communications, utilising the resources and support of the Mozilla Foundation much in the same way Firefox has.

This could progress into new ideas - a complete vision for collaboration/discussion that far exceeds email and shared calendars. The way I see it there are three major discussion technologies currently used on the Internet - Blogs and RSS Feeds, Forums and email.

Why are the first two done primarily in the browser? OK, you can use Thunderbird to download an RSS feed and view it, but you can’t use it as a platform for contributing to the discussion. This involves using a browser. And what about forums? Again, you can subscribe to a forum’s RSS feed to read posts, but not to discuss.

And that’s what I believe is needed - openly developed standards for communication and collaboration. Let’s empower Thunderbird as the pedestal for those standards - Thunderbird needn’t just be an email client with RSS and Usenet functionality.

For more information you could start with Mitchell’s blog, followed by the Future of Thunderbird, and the Future of Mail wikis.

I use Google Reader to provide the articles from my favourite sites as a ‘River of News’ so that I can keep up with the news I want to read in more efficient manner than keeping a list of bookmarks to surf through. Lately, I’ve become deluged with posts and have struggled to keep up with it all in the limited time I get for such purposes. As my feed list approches triple-figures, I’ve had to adapt the way I read my feeds. Here are the five ways I manage my feeds to be as efficient as possible - bear in mind that they’re predominantly Google Reader-based.

1. Star Items

For items that you’re likely to want to refer back to in the future, use Google Reader’s star feature to mark a post as important. This may seem obvious, but it’s the simplest way to start structuring your favourite items for easy reference

2. Tag Items

Another probably obvious one, but taking the time to add a few tags (or ‘labels’ as Google calls them) to each post you’re may want to refer to later, but don’t necessarily warrant a star can save you time in the future.

3. Use the del.icio.us plugin for firefox

Use the del.icio.us plugin to right-click on the headline of an item and bookmark it along with tags, for future reference. Also see #5

4. Collapse your items

In a rush? Use the ‘List View’ rather than the ‘Expanded view’ to quickly skim the titles of items and pick the ones you think really matter to you at this precise moment.

5. The killer tag: ‘toread’

Using the Google Reader tagging system, or in conjunction with del.icio.us, tag an item as ‘toread’ when you know you really want to read an article, but just don’t have the time at the moment - this is more efficient than marking an item as unread, or bunching it in with the starred items etc because you can remove the ‘toread’ tag when you’re done but keep all your other tags for categorisation purposes. Bonus tip: searching del.icio.us for items tagged as ‘toread’ can sometimes provide some interesting results if you’re bored - consider it a StumbleUpon without the toolbar!

These tips could probably be expanded upon - an example would be to add more ‘toxxxx’ tags - todo,tobuy etc etc.

So they’re here. The UK edition of Google ig (the personalised homepage) has finally caught up with its American counterpart and gained tabs. Tabs allow the user to have a set of ‘pages’ on their ig homepage, allowing for greater flexibility in the layout of their homepage and how modules are categorised.

What I fail to understand is why it took so long? Before I started using the ig (admittedly it took a long time for me to start, too) I was using My Yahoo! as my personalised homepage. My Yahoo! has had ‘pages’ support for many, many years and seems such an obvious extension of the personalised homepage system that it’s surprising that Google took so long to implement it.

Commiserations to those who were using google.co.uk/ig as a way to get rid of the tabs - it’ll no longer work!

TechCrunch is reporting that the Skype protocol has been cracked.

This could be a very good thing. Skype’s finance model is derived from people buying credit for items such as a live incoming phone number in a given country (SkypeIn) or make phone calls to existing real telephone numbers (SkypeOut).

Therefore, I can’t see why (assuming their protocol and servers are secure) Skype shouldn’t now open up the protocol and allow third-party developers to develop clients of their own, or integrate Skype into popular multi-network IM/voice clients like Trillian.

I really hate it when websites don’t give you any warning of links which will open in a new window. A lot of sites provide a little icon, or a small superscript comment, or even a tooltip. However, some don’t.

The one site that really annoyed me was Google’s GMail. I always like to keep the left-most tab in firefox on my Google Personalised Home. When a message arrives, I click the GMail header and am consequently presented with the GMail Inbox. Perfect.

In the top-left corner of the GMail homepage is a link back to Google Home (whether personalised or not - it ‘knows’) which opens in a new window. Which is very frustrating if you have lots of tabs open in the current window. After looking for an ‘Open in this tab’ extension and failing to find one, I decided to create my own.

Enter thisTab! - a Mozilla Firefox extension to override the behaviour for a link which uses the target=’_blank’ parameter to open a new window. Note that this won’t work with javascript popup links.

As this is my first foray into any kind of ‘plugin’ development, I’d love to know what people think.