Spicebird introduction

You might have heard of Spicebird if you are following tech blogs or are a regular on Digg,  Del.icio.us or another news aggregating website.

Spicebird is an open-source platform for collaboration.It features an integrated email client, calendar and instant messenger in the first stage but will have additional features that are planned for Spicebird 1.0.

The creators recently published a demonstration video that is showing some of the features that are currently implemented in Spicebird.

The application itself looks pretty stable considering that the next public release will be 0.3 alpha. This release version includes an RSS reader as well. What is missing, or has not been shown in the video is the Wiki which would add tremendous value to the software.

Spicebird is based on Mozilla and uses several modules like Thunderbird and Lightning. A customizable homepage is the starting point whenever you run Spicebird. You can add all sorts of widgets, modules and the likes to it just like you would do on personal startpage websites like Netvibes.

It is possible to add upcoming events, Rss feeds or a mail folder to get a quick overview. I think this is wonderful but they have to think of a solution where someone would want to add lots of RSS feeds to the application. I'm not sure how Spicebird would handle this.

They did add at least one unique feature to the mail client. Mails are automatically scanned for events and if one is found Spicebird will ask if you want to add the event to your calendar. the Instant Messenger is based on Jabber and integrates perfectly into Spicebird.

You do see the online status of your contacts in your address book / contacts list and can send them a message instantly that way.

I hope they do provide easy ways of importing data from Thunderbird, Mozilla and RSS readers into the application which would probably help in gaining users.

Update: Please note that Spicebird has been discontinued. The makers suggest you use Mozilla Thunderbird, and install extensions such as the calendar add-on Lightning to add the missing functionality to Thunderbird.

Advertisement