Mozilla has announced Snowl, a Firefox extension designed to help us keep up with the fast-paced world of RSS feeds, blogs, tweets and all things conversational.

Basically the folks at Mozilla know how much we all like to Tweet and carry on conversations using all the different desktop and web applications at our disposal. Snowl is an attempt to try and keep track of all your conversations.

The Firefox experiment endeavors to answer the question, “Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions?” by incorporating messaging into your browser based on a few key ideas:

- 1 It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.

- 2 Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones.

- 3 A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later.

- 4 Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages.

With these points in mind, Mozilla has designed a prototype that supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter, with two main interfaces; one for the important messages and one for the not so important ones you’d just like to skim through in your spare time.

The “list” view has three panels and looks a little similar to what you get with Thunderbird’s email client. Feeds to the left, messages on top and preview panel below. When you’re not using the preview panel to read your messages or keep an eye on your feeds, you can browse the web from that window. The tool for viewing your less important messages is based around the “river of news” idea, which Mozilla accredits to David Winer.

So far reactions to Snowl are pretty mixed. Some people seem to like it and others are pretty luke-warm about the idea. Many people complain that once installed, they have no idea where it went. Snowl is accessible by clicking view – Message List, or view – River of Messages. It’s small details like this that have early-adopters confused.

This is a prototype and Mozilla did say in the official blog post that the company was putting this out there to gauge feedback and in turn, determine whether or not it’s worth pursuing.

So far we like it. It’s got a few kinks, and aesthetically, it leaves something to be desired. This is something we think could be great if it was introduced as a stand-alone application.