There’s a new product in town that I’m very excited about, called Spicebird.

It was made by a very inovative startup named Synovel, based in India. It’s not even out of Beta (0.4) yet and has already reached 10 thousand downloads. I don’t know about you, but that is a lot - in comparison, I’ve got trouble getting more than a few hunded visitors per day!

Spicebird is actually a heavily modified Thunderbird, Sunbird and Xmpp4moz (IM add-on) stitched together to form the ultimate collaboration tool, something a bit like Microsoft’s Groove.

Of course it is released under open source licenses - a tri-license, to be exact. In short, it gives you a great deal of usage freedom and a price of 0$.

I found Groove to be very interesting and was dissapointed that there is no solid opensource alternative, and that’s why I think Spicebird is a great app.

The ‘front page’ features a tabbed interface, where you may add, delete and rearrange widgets of your own choice: a clock, a calendar, an rss news feed, upcoming events agenda - by being opensource I expect Spicebird to have gazillions of widgets by the end of this year, if it gains enough popularity. And that’s what I’m waiting for. Don’t forget why people still use Firefox 2.

For now, it’s got an e-mail client, a calendar and an instant messenger. You can also use it to read RSS feeds. If you’re to lazy to download it, check out the online demo video.

In conclusion, I find it to be a great idea with a lot of potential. The opensource community has already proven that it can produce tons of neat and useful apps, but what it lacks is some serious software for bussineses, just like Spicebird will soon become, in order to spread into this demanding market.

What are your thoughts on Spicebird?