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Posts Tagged ‘Aggregators’

Mozilla’s Raindrop: An Open Conversation Aggregator

While most conversation aggregators are concerned with harnessing your river of data, Mozilla is breaking it down into manageable raindrops. According to a morning blog post on the Mozilla Labs site the company is launching the prototype for Raindrop 0.1, a product that they’re calling “open messaging for the open web”. While Mozilla’s Snowl Firefox Add-On made it possible to follow streams and rivers of messages in your existing browser, Raindrop offers what appears to be a much cleaner interface and an API to hack on your own personal conversation dashboard.

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Raindrop’s mission is to “make it enjoyable to participate in conversations from people you care about, whether the conversations are in email, on twitter, a friend’s blog or as part of a social networking site.” Essentially, Raindrop is cutting out the noise and pulling in the information that is actually of interest.

While email clients can filter bot and spam messages, it’s more difficult to discern between personal and general messages from real people. With Raindrop, users messages are categorized and prioritized. For example, in Twitter your direct messages and reply messages are highlighted while the rest of the stream is cast aside. Meanwhile, mailing list messages are also given their own category, separate from personal emails. As with most Mozilla products, the group will encourage front-end widgets and code from outside 3rd party developers.

While the tool certainly shows promise, it is currently only available to developers. The group’s first priority is to build a downloadable installer. To ensure that you’re one of the first non-developer testers, keep an eye on labs.mozilla.com/raindrop.

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

Thanks to Arjo for the tip!

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AdMob Rumored To Have Acquired AdWhirl

We’ve heard from numerous sources that mobile ad network AdMob may be in the process of acquiring AdWhirl, the startup that lets iPhone developers tap into multiple ad networks. One source has even said that AdWhirl is already working out of AdMob’s offices, though we haven’t confirmed this.

Asked on the phone whether AdWhirl has been acquired by AdMob, AdWhirl CEO Sam Yam responded, “How did you know that,” before clamming up with a “no comment.”

It’s an interesting partnership, and one that raises a few questions. AdWhirl allows developers to switch between different ad networks on the fly without having to submit a new application coded with another ad network to Apple. The service has support for five different ad networks, including AdMob, Quattro Wireless, Videoegg, Jumptap, Mobclix and Millenial Media. Mobclix has a competing iPhone exchange that AdMob is not a part of. But if AdMob and AdWhirl have a relationship, this might make the waters a bit murky for the other networks. It would be suspect to have an open platform that is owned by one of the ad networks.

The acquisition does come as a surprise, however. In June, AdMob announced its decision to cut off ad network aggregators like AdWhirl and Tapjoy, claiming it had been hearing of complaints of technical glitches related to ads served by such “ad net mediators.” The company later announced a delay in this decision in August.

We’ve asked AdMob for confirmation and will update as soon as we hear back.

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