During today’s Snowl: Messaging in the browser session, Myk Melez introduced a new Firefox extension called (you guessed!) Snowl, to explore what does it take and whether it makes sense to add messaging capabilities to the browser.

Being an early prototype, Snowl currently only handles Twitter feeds and web feeds you subscribe either manually within Firefox or importing an OPML file.

Then comes another the other experimental aspect of Snowl: presentation. Twitter and web feeds are added to a sidebar (available from the View menu) but instead of folders and items as you may expect, you get a set of predefined searches that return not only the feed titles but also groupings by author name which consolidates all messages you have received from that person.

Click on a sidebar item and you get all the related messages in an email like view in either a horizontal or vertical layout.

Things then get even more interesting when you switch to Message River view (View menu). Based on the concept of the river of news, it consolidates the item titles or contents of the selected author or feed into a continuous page that favors horizontal scrolling (as opposed to typical vertical scrolling) as a way to: take advantage of larger screens and provide an experience that resembles the interaction with newspapers more closely.

Contents can be sorted by date ascending or descendingly, and are displayed in columns you can easily resize.

While the benefits are pretty obvious (make it easier for users the task of tracking the many communication ways currently available: email, social networks, web feeds, newsgroups, instant messaging and pretty much any asynchronous medium), Myk main question is: Is the browser the right place for this aggregation to happen?

For me it would work as I would definitely want to have it as close to my browser as possible. Messaging moved into the browser realm first and this just looks like the browser going to meet it half way, which is good.

What I am not sure is if it’s worth implementing so many interfaces with so many social networks and web mail providers, adding a dependency that is most likely to break at some point like Flock users can attest.

Ideally, I would prefer an open standard for the most common social networking and emailing activities: messaging and sharing, but it just seems so distant that maybe dealing with all the current web interfaces is a good enough second best.

Snowl should be available from the Mozilla Labs web site in the next few days, in the meantime you can get it and try it from Myk’s personal folder.