Network Lighthouse

Ahh, had a post ready and firefox crashed, what gives!

This is one of the most significant SocialMail releases to date, rather than new users needing to apply for their own Rapleaf API key, SocialMail now has it’s own key (Thanks to Rapleaf) with a limit of 20,000 queries per month, hopefully this is enough for now!

The great benefit of this is that once SocialMail is installed, users will be able to start seeing the social networks of their contacts, without any further fuss.

If you already have an API key that’s fine, SocialMail will continue to use it for your queries, which will help take the pressure off the shared key.

To make this work properly and protect the new key, I’ve created an API proxy which all SocialMail api queries will go through so that the new API key can be added if necessary.  Unfortunately this means that for the moment, HTTPS queries are disabled until I can afford secure hosting.

So without any further fuss, here it is:SocialMail v0.4.5 I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to your feedback.  If all goes well I’ll post to AMO later in the weekend for wider distribution.

I’m working on a way for SocialMail to work out of the box for new users,  its a bit ugly at the moment with every new user having to get a RapLeaf API key before SocialMail starts working properly.

In order to smooth the process I’m arranging a new single API key with a higher limit and will be releasing a new version of SocialMail which proxies queries through my server.  This is the only way I can protect the new key and stop people taking advantage of it and using the majority of the queries for themselves depriving the rest of the community.

To make sure I have the numbers right, I’d like to collect some statistics from everyone and would appreciate it if you would all post the number of queries  you’ve made in the last month, from the email that rapleaf sends out .

This way I can make sure that, I have a sufficient limit to support the curent user base and some growth and if I need to put my own limits in can do so in a manner as fair as possible.

-Daniel

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

— From the article

The college student accused of hacking into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account in 2008 has been found guilty of obstruction of justice and unauthorized access of a computer. The verdict against 22-year-old David Kernell came down late Friday, with sentencing to follow later.

— via Palin e-mail hacker found guilty.

I have mixed feelings about this outcome, while the individual undoubtadly did the wrong thing be breaking into someones email account, he also highlighted the risks we all face(particularly public figures) as a result of the (secret) question/answer system for reseting forgotten passwords.

I don’t think these issues could have been highlighted in any more clear way to raise the publics awareness of this.  No matter how many times the security iductry warns against the weaknesses of the present system, it takes real incidents (like the above) before the issues are generally accepted.

-Daniel

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