It’s a new year and the Raindrop team is looking forward, deciding what we want to become in this 2010. We successfully unmasked ourselves and launched a project driven by innovation to change what has become a stale world of messaging.

I don’t want to repeat anything that avid readers have already seen so here are some quick highlights and some news for the future.

Design

If you’ve been reading the Raindrop Design Blog you’d have already seen the latest mockups from Mobile to Attachments.

Be sure to take a look at the latest design blog entry, Raindrop Design Status

Here’s a quick video demo of some of the new interactions guided by our Graphic Designer Andy :

Vimeo

For all of our latest videos check out Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo. Here are a few more of the latest videos:

• File Attachments
• Really Cool Video

Twitter

On Twitter you can now follow @MozillaRaindrop for all the latest screenshots and news about Raindrop design and development. To catch you up, here are some of the tweets you’ve missed.

• #raindrop now pulls out GPS information from EXIF data on images so you can see where that photo was taken $
• Flickr link expanding landed in raindrop, http://i.imgur.com/OY0JL.png How does that look? $
• Vimeo links are now data mined inside raindrop too, check it out: http://i.imgur.com/f4fRg.png (@_andychung) $
• NYT API (@timesopen) getting link info for NYT links in Raindrop, http://i.imgur.com/uWv3w.png maybe @donohoe will get it running now $
• http://vimeo.com/8771552 – Quick video of me clicking through some attached links in #Raindrop $
• http://vimeo.com/8772031 – one more quick video showing file attachments being clicked through. @jrburke is pumping good stuff out today! $
• http://i.imgur.com/ekReU.png – having some fun with our metrics prompt $
• Cool! First link to Raindrop from the nytimes (a blog, but still!) http://bit.ly/5w4CiB $
• Kittens inspired by kittens in #raindrop: http://i.imgur.com/RMqJ9.png$
• Now with super paper clip action! http://i.imgur.com/bJt9u.png (@clarkbw) $

Flickr

Our Raindrop Flickr Design Group continues to be an excellent place for comments and ideas on new mockups posted for fun and for blogging.

Development Discussions

To continue to keep pace with Raindrop Development you’ll want to subscribe to the Raindrop Development mailing list on Google Groups. It’s necessary to at least watch the group if you’re developing along so you know when new code has landed and it’s time to reprocess your development raindrop.

If you’re not interested in the development discussion or latest code to index links from the new york times then you’ll at least want to watch for Jame’s weekly design and developer emails to keep pace with what’s happening without following the source code.

For more in depth development discussion, check out Mark’s latest entry Dynamic dependencies in the raindrop data-model

2010

We have several goals for the coming year, I’ll list them briefly, check back here on on the Raindrop wiki if you’re looking for more details and specific milestones of when these will come out.

1. Polish, clean up our existing experiences to get ready for more
2. Clarity, better conversation layout and attachment support
3. Find, a simple, new, and innovative way to provide search that actually works
4. Actions, quick and easy ways to process and handle your conversations
5. Relationships, real and unique communication relationship assistance

Can we say “One more thing…” ?

A hosted preview version of Raindrop targeting availability for alpha testers by the end of Q2.

More details to follow as we build out a hosted version and of course invitations quickly there after. Stay tuned.

And if you’re wondering how we keep up with all these different channels, we use Raindrop