I’m thrilled to announce that we launched Raindrop today.  Raindrop is Mozilla Messaging’s experiment in messaging on the open web, hosted by Mozilla Labs.  You should definitely go over to the introductory post, and check out the first few pages we’ve put up describing the goal of the project, how we’ve built it so far, and how we’re hoping to engage designers as well as developers to participate in the ongoing effort.

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.