The Mozilla camp have announced the launch of their new add-on for Firefox, called Snowl. It can be thought of as a messaging aggregator, which takes all of the information you want to read from different sources and knits it all together.

Just step back for a moment and think about that. Everything in one place. All of your RSS feeds, your email, your twitter accounts, your facebook messages - all in one place. A great idea, as long as the interface doesn’t let the concept down - it would seem very easy to get snowed under by the huge amount of information. You can download the plug-in now if you want, although it’s in a really early stage of development, so expect bugs and frequent crashes.

Among the concepts talked about for Snowl, one of them is a “River of News” format, which is like a columned newspaper that runs horizontally. There is mention of prioritising certain types of information, which I think will be the key. After all, you’re more likely to want to read an email from a family member, than a news article. I am very interested in the project, and will be keeping an eye on it in the future - I’m always after ways of making my online information easier to get at, and therefore making me more efficient.