Most of you would have already seen the IM that we had in the 0.4 release and a lot of feedback did reach us.  There were thoughts on improving the windows, the integration and requests to support more IM protocols (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ and more).  We did brain-storm a lot on how to solve these issues, and here is the new Telepathy based recipe we came up with.  We are still experimenting and are not really sure how this experiment would end up, specially for Windows.

Its been more than three weeks since we released the first public beta of Spicebird. So, what have we done since then and what has changed in our priorities and roadmap?

The short answer is - Yes! thats a promise.

The Spicebird source code is released under the same license terms as the Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird source code. We did that not as an obligation, but to make sure that all our work can go upstream without much trouble with the licenses.

Spicebird would be an open source project in it's true sense. The community will be involved in decision making and in the development of this project. We welcome contributions from the user and developer community in the form of feedback, bug reports and patches.

A big thank you to everyone who tried Spicebird. It's been a week and Spicebird Beta 0.4 was downloaded more than 10000 times from www.spicebird.com.

We did get a lot of feedback from the community - criticism, pats and feature requests. We will try our best to incorporate all you suggestions into the next releases (or hopefully in the updates). If you still have something to say, do mail me at prasad@synovel.com.

We are working towards making our SVN and the bugzilla available to everyone and keep watching this space for an announcement about it.

David Ascher recently mentioned Spicebird in his blog and suddenly we started finding articles and discussions about it at various places on the web. Feels good, but I thought its time we speak about it and set the expectations right.

What is Spicebird?

Spicebird is an open-source platform for collaboration. To start with, we integrated e-mail, calendar and instant messaging into one suite. The features available on the website are for Version 1.0, but we do have plans to release intermediate versions (one of which will be available really soon. Our roadmap and anonymous access to SVN will accompany the release)

Mozilla has announced a new initiative to overhaul email and internet communications in general. The new company, MailCo, will be given $3 million in startup capital from Mozilla to start with the Thunderbird code and work from there. MailCo will be led by David Ascher of ActiveState fame and, according to him, will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit.