Raindrop is a project of Mozilla Labs, which aims to create a unified messaging application and a social networks aggregator. It's in an early development stage, but still promising.
While I do see a current need for aggregation of centralized social network sites, I'm convinced distributed social networking will succeed at last. Raindrop might however be able to support this issue by offering a unified personal interface for social networking.
Since Ubuntu Karmic already comes with Pyhton and CouchDB, installing Raindrop is quite straightforward:
Raindrop does not yet offer a graphical configuration utility, so you will need a text editor.
gedit ~/.raindrop
Here's an example configuration file:
[account-twitter-yourusername]
proto=twitter
kind=twitter
username=yourusername
password=yourpassword
[account-imap-yourusername]
proto=imap
kind=imap
host=mail.example.com
port=143
username=yourusername
password=yourpassword
ssl=False
[account-rss-markusthielmanncom]
proto=rss
uri=http://markusthielmann.com/feed
After you created a configuration, you might want to tell Raindrop to fetch your messages:
cd ~/raindrop/server/python
./run-raindrop.py sync-messages --max-age=5days
After the script finishes, you're able to have a look at your inbox:
http://localhost:5984/raindrop/inflow/index.html
A word of warning: Raindrop does currently not support desktop-couch. This means, every user on your PC is able to access your inbox via the given URL. So if you're running a multiuser system, be warned.
