Google Wave gets a competitor in Raindrop from Mozilla: This is good news

Raindrops falling on Google Wave's head?

This sounds familiar: "We started from scratch designing what a communication application should be."

That's a quote from Brian Clark who introduces a video about Raindrop, released today by the Mozilla Labs.

You can't download it yet, and it's not available to run on the the Web, but you can read about it. (TechCrunch was there first with the story, again. They've been scooping everyone this week.)

So, why is that quote familiar? It sounds a lot like everything we've heard from the Google Wave team, talking about how they want to invent a "new communications model that presumed all these advances (blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc.) as a starting point."

We'll have plenty of time to look at the differences between these two in the coming weeks and months, but for me the first real difference is in the underlying architecture.

In short, Wave is creating communications using a radically different method of routing, securing, and delivering information. Raindrop looks great, but it is still gathering in emails and other electronic information over the regular systems used now to deliver tweets, status updates, blogs and the rest, and then does some clever tricks to present them to the user.

In this way, Raindrop has an opportunity to blow several other new faces out of the water, players like Threadsy or  the Lifestream project from AOL. More competition here is always welcome (unless you are Threadsy and innovated first, only to see your innovations overshadowed).

So is this a Wave killer? My hunch is that this will actually help Wave. Here's why: If more people use this and sort of forget about Wave for a while, the Wave team and all the myriad people working on other solutions that will work on top of Wave will have more time to work without the overwhelming pressure from all those still dying for a Google Wave Invite.

Look, anything that helps make sense of the overwhelming flood of data coming at each of us every day is a good thing. If Wave lives or dies, it won't be because of someone making improvements to the way we interact with email.

I am playing with Wave every day and reading lots, but I am open to all suggestions about what aspects of Wave to cover. If you have a tip, well, I'm like a waiter: I live on the tips. Contact me on Scott, or in Wave on "scodtt" or via Twitter using the button below. Also, be sure to grab the RSS feed or subscribe to my email using the buttons above so you can get all the very best in Google Wave news and analysis from a non-technical perspective.