It’s going to be fun to have both an experimental platform for next-generation experiments on messaging, which leverages the web of the future, as well as a Thunderbird client which provides both an awesome desktop experience today, and lets more people build interesting, fun, and useful add-ons as well.

I want to make sure to express my thanks to everyone who contributed to Raindrop thus far: Andrew Sutherland who did some initial experiments a long time ago; Chris Anderson, Jan Lenhardt, and Damien Katz of the CouchDB project, who’ve been super helpful in helping us understand their awesome database; Bryan Clark, who’se done a great job juggling Thunderbird and Raindrop design leadership; Mark Hammond, who took Andrew’s original draft and built a great backend infrastructure (it’s great to work with Mark again!); James Burke, for whom no UI requirement is too much; Andy Chung, who makes everyone else look great; and Chris Beard, Myk Melez and Pascal Finette, of Mozilla Labs, for their advice, hosting, and feedback.

2010 will be amazing.