Mozilla Lab introduced yesterday a addon for Mozilla called Snowl. The purpose of Snowl is to integrate different messaging into the browser. It doesn’t matter where messages originate. It could be RSS feed or forum or social networks or email etc. It allows a search based interface for message retrieval and browser functionality for navigating messages similar to navigating bookmarks, history etc.

The initial prototype supports two sources of messages: RSS/Atom feeds
and Twitter. And it exposes two interfaces for reading them. First, a
traditional three-pane “list” view, targeted to active reading of
important messages. Second, a “river of news” view designed for casual browsing.

In future Snowl might include

• support for additional message sources, e.g. Facebook, AIM, Google Talk, etc.;
  
• an interface for writing and sending messages to enable true two-way conversations;
• an API to make it easier for developers to build new experimental interfaces, e.g. an instant message view.

This sounds more like Mozilla is working towards getting Firefox do everything and thus replacing Thunderbird email client. Mozilla lab acknowledges that some of the features overlap Mozilla Messaging’s idea for Thunderbird. Let’s wait and see.