The first question that obviously comes to mind is how Snowl is any different from current RSS News Feed Readers and the honest answer at this point has to be not much. Twitter is offering RSS News Feeds as well which means that any RSS Reader can currently display the same information that Mozilla Snowl can.

The only difference currently lies in the interface which provides two different view modes. The first reminds of desktop email clients like Thunderbird. It is divided into three different panes, on the left the RSS News Feeds, in the upper half the messages of the selected RSS News Feed and at the bottom half the selected message.

The second view mode is called River of Messages which looks pretty much like a newspaper when the messages are expanded. That mode looks pretty fine to receive a quick overview of new items that have been added.

Snowl does have a few of the problems that I experienced with the Live Bookmarks setting in Firefox. Importing RSS News Feeds virtually slows down the system to a halt. That’s extremely frustrating if you import hundreds of feeds from an OPML file. The same happens if you update the feeds, something that you will never experience in external applications or online services like Google Reader.

That alone is reason enough for me to not use Mozilla Snowl on a regular basis. The developers have some interesting plans for Snowl. They want to add true two-way communication capabilities, for example reading and writing Twitter messages.