Mozilla Labs has unveiled a new project, Raindrop, that it characterizes as an "open experiment in messaging on the web." From the messaging team behind Mozilla's Thunderbird email project, Raindrop uses a mini web server to sift conversations from various sources such as mail, Twitter and RSS feeds, then attempts to pull out the important parts and have them rise to the top. It works with Firefox, Safari or Chrome, and though it's still in its infancy, the open source project looks promising and bears some very rough resemblance to what Google is trying to do with Google Wave.

Every year or two, some hardware component comes down the line that truly takes my breath away. On the past few occasions, these bits of circuitry have all used open source software in some capacity, though whether that's due to my tendency to notice such things, or a measurable increase in hardware developments that feature open source technology is uncertain.

TMCnet introduced me to this year's "take your breath away" device, the Marvell SheevaPlug. This plug computer (it's designed to hang comfortably from a household wall socket) features a 1.22 GHz Kirkwood (Sheeva-based) processor, 512 MB DRAM, and a Gigabit ethernet connection. In addition to its onboard 512 MB Flash storage, the plug has a USB port for external storage. The hardware, the multiple Linux distributions it currently supports, and the API framework (called "Raindrop") that is currently being developed for running third party applications -- are all open source.

Why? Because, as Marvell's product manager, Raja Mukhopadhyay told TMCnet, "...[open source] is what we see going forward."