Filed under : “Instant Messaging”

Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions? Snowl is an experiment to answer that question. It's a prototype Firefox extension that integrates messaging into the browser.

The initial prototype supports two sources of messages: RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter.

And it exposes two interfaces for reading them: a traditional three-pane "list" view, targeted to active reading of important messages; and a "river of news" view, based on the concept popularized by Dave Winer, designed for casual browsing.