Google Set to Make Gmail Social With Status Update Features [Social Networks]

Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. Google might announce these features on Tuesday, 10AM.
As WSJ points out, Gmail users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter.
Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google-owned YouTube and Picasa will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook.
If so, the new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck or Seesmic, looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of e-mail users into adherents to a whole new breed of social media service.
An issue with the latter, however, is that Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.
In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.
[Mashable]

Mozilla Raindrop Keeps Messaging Personal [News]

Today, Mozilla announced a new open source project called Raindrop, a service that pulls your social content from multiple sources and organizes it in one place to create a centralized messaging experience that matters to you.
The goal of Raindrop is to make email and messaging personal again, and allow complete customizability in how you manage that information. It brings in content from multiple, sources such as Twitter, RSS feeds, and email, and presents it in one central, web-based front end. Thus, instead of having to watch multiple sources just to keep up on your personal conversations, you can focus on one single bucket.
Raindrop can also decide which conversations are important to you and your life, and "bubble up" that information to the top—while keeping the less important messages out of the way. In addition, like all Mozilla projects, Raindrop will be extensible—whether through HTML, Java, CSS, or APIs—in order for you to further personalize your experience.
Mozilla says that the goal is not to invent a new protocol or system, but better handle ones that already exist. The video demo (above) explains some of the basic principles behind Raindrop.
Raindrop is still in very early stages, and isn't something the basic user can try out just yet, but it's certainly something we'll be keeping an eye on.

Raindrop

[Lifehacker via Mozilla Labs]