Network Lighthouse

In time for the release of SocialMail’s first plugin, I’m also releasing a new version of SocialMail.

In this release:

• Profile pictures from the address books (default & SocialMail)
• Improved display name grabbing from email headers
• A few UI improvements
• A couple of bug fixes

Not a lot I realise, but the LinkedIn interface really benefits from the UI tweaks.

Download load it here: socialMail-v0.4, I’ll stick it on AMO in a couple of days.

-Daniel

It took a while however I am most pleased to present the first SocialMail plugin, smLinkedIn.   The plugin grabs information from LinkedIn for those contacts that we have profile URLs for.

Right now it presents

• Headline
• Company/Job information
• How you’re connected
• URL’s

The plugin also allows you to send LinkedIn Connection requests to your contacts, so you can continue to expand your LinkedIn.  Also you can post status updates to LinkedIn.  A word of caution, if you’ve already connected Twitter to your LinkedIn account, don’t use SocialMail to post updates for both networks as it will cause double posts to LinkedIn.

In order to use this, you must have SocialMail 0.3 or higher installed and then download and install the Linkedin extension : smlinkedin_v0.1.2(right click, Save As. Then install into Thunderbird as per a normal addon)

Hope you find this useful.

-Daniel

A couple of things have happened recently to change my priorities with SocialMail. Firstly I found out that Twitter are planning to decomision basic user/password authentication and move solely to OAuth. Since I don’t want to cause issue for users down the line I decided that I should switch socialmail to use OAuth as well.

To accomplish this I modified the twitterHelper.jsm library to support OAuth, thanks to the way that it was originally written the changes were pretty straight forward and the biggest challenge was actually understanding how OAuth itself works.

The second event that happened is that I got feedback on my first attempt at gaining approval on AMO. The only issue is how I was storing passwords, I should have used the login manager api. This didn’t present a huge issue particularly since I’d just been working on the OAuth stuff.

With those two changes out of the way, the only other change of note is an announcement panel, shown when SocialMail is loaded that will pull the last tweet from “TB_SocialMail” where I will make announcements about new releases and features in the future.

All that done and I’m quite happy to release socialmail 0.3 to the masses. Have fun with this version SocialMailv0.3, hopefuly it will become the first Mozilla approved version.

-Daniel

A couple of days ago I got a comment on one of my posts that struck me as unusual, it was marked as spam (thanks to akismet), but didn’t read like your standard spam. Here’s the text:

Good points raised here, (well, what I could read of it). I am afflicted with color blindness (tritanopia to be exact). I use Chrome browser (unsure if that matters), and a lot of your site is a little difficult for me to read. I don’t wish to whinge, and I know it is my problem really, nonetheless it would be cool if you could bear in mind color blind visitors when carrying out the next site re-working.

After a first glance I almost approved it without further thought, however something struck me as odd.   The comment linked to p_l_a_y_n_i_c_e .c_o .u_k, which backs up the post, still not convinced I did some googling and found a number of blogs with almost identically worded comments.   There was some differences in the wording, the browser changes, I’ve seen Chrome, Konqurer and Safari and there are a couple of different introductions.

The only thing I am sure of now is that this isn’t a legitimate comment, but is meant to serve some other purpose.   It may be just for self promotion, grandfathering links for search eangines, or potentially preparation for a drive by download attack.  I’ll keep track of the page and report any changes.

-Daniel

Well in between job interviews (I’m an Info Sec manager, based in Brisbane, AU, if anyone is hiring), I’ve been adding some new features and tidying up the code.  This release finally brings to life one of the most requested features, the ability to select a different image source for each contact.

Click (left mouse button) on a contact’s image and you’ll be presented with a dropdown list of the available image sources for that person.  Once you’ve selected a source you are happy with click outside the popup and it will disappear.

The change is displayed live as you make it, and is fixed to the source, not the image, so if someones twitter profile image is updated and that’s where you’re getting their profile picture from, you’ll see the new picture.  Which brings me slightly off-topic, SocialMail now garners profile image information from the tweet stream if twitter is being used, so the twitter image will always be fairly up-to-date and current.

As I mentioned above, only sites which are providing image url’s will show up in the drop down.  However if you want to add a profile image for a site, or (for example) add details about a niche social network, that RapLeaf or SocialMail haven’t discovered, then you can add those details to SocialMail so that they are always at hand.   This is done by the new “Manage Social Networks” popup, which can be access by clicking “[+]” next to the “Social Networks” heading.   This window allows users to manually setup and modify the social networks that are attached to a contact.   Caution is advised when using this view as it is important to get the urls correct otherwise things will not work as expected.

Other minor features that have been added in this release are:

• Integrating URLs from the addressbook, the same as was done with phone numbers in the last release
• If an alternate email address is added to a contact (in the SocialMail addressbook only) then when discovery is next run for them, both email addresses will be searched
• The number of twitter followers/followees(?) for a contact is now displayed at the bottom of the twitter tab, as is a button that allows you to follow them if you are not already.
• The ability to “reply” to tweets.

I think thats it, so here it is SocialMail v0.2.5 (right click, Save as).   I’ll post this to AMO in a few days if no-one reports any major issues.

Don’t think that because we are a quater of the way to 1.0, I am a quater of the way through the project, not by a long shot. but now that SocialMail’s framework is stabilising I can begin focussing on more integration pieces, next on my plan is OpenSocial integration, since a common API should mean I can add several sites without to much additional work.

And finally, Larry over at LEHSYS.COM has put together another video clip showing off SocialMail and some of the new features, many thanks Larry.  Check it out:  SocialMail on YouTube