SocialMail: Next steps
by Daniel on May.18, 2010, under SocialMail
Development has been slow recently, with a new job, a trip to London and moving house I haven’t had much time to work on SocialMail.
Hopefully now that things are starting to settle down I can get focussed on taking SocialMail further. I really would like to get some community input as I don’t want to waste my time developing features that are of no interest to the users.
At the moment my thoughts are (in know particular order):
- More Integrations with social networks, I am seriously considering the OpenSocial based sites as I can cover multiple sites with minimal additional code.
- A user interface rework, scrapping the sidepanel and making socialmail more integrated into the Thunderbird interface. For example, moving the profile picture into the header bar of the preview pane.
- Changing the API model so that new users don’t need to acquire their own rapleaf api key (discussed below)
The last one is likely to be the most contreversial but I think will have the greatest impact in terms of enabling new users to use SocialMail. At present I have between 10-20 downloads per day, not to shabby, however this isn’t translating into new users well, as I am only seeing slight growth week on week. I am of the belief that part of the reason is that users can’t be bothered with getting their own RapLeaf key, which takes a day or two depending on how busy they are.
What I’d like to do is pre-provision SocialMail with the ability to work out of the box, no need to register to get at least a few api calls a day. At present I am talking to RapLeaf to work out exactly how this can be acheived and hope to come up with a workable solution and hope to come up with something in a few days.
Outside of those ideas, are there any suggestions on what people would like to see from SocialMail, just keep in mind, if it’s a request to integrate with another socialnetwork/site then an existing public API is a must, I aim to keep clear of private APIs and will not write code for scraping content directly from sites.
-Daniel
May 20th, 2010 on 1:00 pm
first off, SocialMail has really changed the way I observe Thunderbird- it’s much more fascinating now.
BUT… YPoints of importance; in this order:
In my opinion…
1. I think the most important right now; getting SocialMail installed without requiring an API key- it’s not the funnest thing in the world and while I like stats… Rapleaf sends me emails every week of how much I’m using their service.
2. Creating more connections and making SocialMail more ‘social’ is a good idea.
3. I personally like the sidebar; I know exactly where to go to get more information on what I’m looking at. I wouldn’t be a big fan of completely scraping it, but perhaps more options about integration options [check boxes]…
Other stuff:
» I’m still hopeful that we may see some sort of web based IM functionality. Possibly with SocialMail ability to have extensions.
» I’d like to see a counter on characters when you’re sending ‘tweets’; the add-on doesn’t tell you right now if your over your limit.
» Tweets; being able to drag-and-drop a link or URL in to the tweet box and do URL shortening; if possible.
As usual, you could stop now and I’d be very happy- everything else is gravy.
I appreciate it…
Until next time,
LEHenryJr
LEHSYS.com
June 24th, 2010 on 5:01 pm
Hi Daniel
I’ve been on the lookout for a Xobni-like equivalent for Thunderbird ever since I dropped Outlook for email. I think it’s a great start.
I’d tend to agree that requiring the secondary act of obtaining a separate rapleaf key will confuse all but the most technical so if you can eradicate this that would be a plus.
As to different presentational options, I’d suggest they’re just that… options. Give people the choice of how SocialMail appears inside Thunderbird.
Graphically the presentation needs ot be a little slicker, but that’s perhaps less important than the usability. Pretty is nice if there’s time and the available skills.
Overall I’ve only just started to use SocialMail but I’ll stick with it.
Cheers
Ralph
@ralphenn
http://ennclick.com
July 22nd, 2010 on 12:52 am
Hi there.
SocialMail is proving to be hugely useful to me. I’d seen Xnobi a while ago and liked the idea but couldn’t find anything for Thunderbird and gave up looking, then I came across your plugin totally by accident.
It really is useful, however there’s one thing I would suggest, and that’s around the address book it keeps marked “SocialMail”.
All my addresses for people are in “Personal Address Book” and when I interact with an email SocialMail grabs the details and puts it in its own address book, not the main one I use to sync with all my devices. Even if the entry exists in my address book, it still creates a new copy in SocialMail, so any alterations I make to the contact on the sidebar appear only in that address book.
To stop me manually merging these two together it would be great if SocialMail used the contact details from your existing address book, and any new ones were stored in SocialMail with maybe an option to edit before updating the default address book.
Just a thought, but so far that’s the biggest issue I’ve come across and the only stumbling block for the addin for me.
Oh one thing though, although there is a “United Kingdom” option on the “Default Country Code” drop down for the Skype settings in SocialMail options, whenever I select it the entry displayed is “Isle of Man”. Strange that.
Anyway, address books, that’s my suggestion.
Richard
July 22nd, 2010 on 8:21 pm
Thanks Richard,
It’s an intersting idea, and my initial thoughts are that I could implement this as a configuration option, use SocialMail Addresbook by default but allow others to be used instead. The reason I didn’t do this initially is that there are a lot of touch points on the addressbook and I’m doing a few non-standard things with it.
I’ll ponder this some more and see how it can be acheived.
-Daniel
August 1st, 2010 on 12:42 am
Hello Daniel!
Do you plan to implement an overall statistics screen?
I think seeing a “map”, a kinda mirror of yourself and your contacts behavior where you can see patterns and other usage stats would be a huge thing.
For me this seems to be the future of smart softwares.
Xobni has something like this, just to clear what i am looking for : http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/XobniAnalytics.jpg
Keep up to good work on Socialmail!
Adam
August 2nd, 2010 on 9:40 pm
Hi Adam,
Thanks for the suggestion. I like the general idea and will add it to my todo list, the only thing I can think of at the moment is not wanting to re-implement some of the things that you can already get out of Thunderbird with the new search engine.
Just as an update for everyone else, I’ve started work on a MySpace(OpenSocial) plugin, once thats done I should be able to open up the other O/S platforms quite quickly, the only issue I have is that it looks like it will be a seperate plugin for each site as I can’t work out how to create it generic.
-Daniel