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

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

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

It’s been a few weeks since SocialMail 0.13 was released and I’ve been busy in the mean time.   If you’ve read my last few posts you’ll know that the interface as been redone to allow a lot more information to be displayed while keeping the most recent details up front.

The interface has been converted to a tab based layout which allows us to have different screen areas for each information source, while allowing the front tab, to show the latest details from each section (user configurable).

SocialMail v0.2 also includes the first cut of twitter functionality, which once enabled adds a new tab which show the last 10 or so (configurable) tweets from whoever you’re viewing.   Users can now ‘tweet’ directly from Thunderbird with the new ‘Update Status’ functionality which will ultimately allow sending updates to multiple micro-blogging sites (twitter, myspace, facebook, linkedin, etc) as modules for those sites are added.

All  in all, a lot has gone into this SocialMail update, which is why it’s taken longer than anticipated, so I hope you all enjoy it and look forward to hearing your experiences with it.

So here it is: SocialMailv0.2.1

(NOTE: This is a small update to address 2 isssues raised by Larry)

Have Fun,

Daniel

It’s been a while since I’ve last posted an update on SocialMail so I figure it time to let everyone know what I’ve been working on.

One of the issues with the current release is that there is to much information to fit in the sidepanel.  If you have a contact that has data in each of the boxes then it forces the thunderbird window to expand, in my case (and I’m sure many others) this means off the end of the screen.    This issue is set to become much worse as I add functionality and new datasources.  To resolve this the interfaces has been reworked to use tabs to seperate the key parts, while keeping the most recent information on the first tab for easy access/reference.

Switching to a tab based layout has made things a lot clearer and will help with the integration of new data sources,  each of which can now have it’s own space to render as it needs.   Extra elements can be added as modules, without have to mess with the main code, so it will be theoretically possible for others to write SocialMail modules to extend it with specific extensions (much like SocialMail extends Thunderbird).

Twitter integration is now also well underway, with tweets being automatically displayed when you view an email from a contact who uses twitter.   Functionality to be able to post (re)tweets/direct messages/etc isn’t in yet, but thanks to the guys who wrote twitterHelper.jsm, shouldn’t take to long.

One last thing, for anyone familiar with the workings of XUL.   When I have a listbox which has the listcell-iconic style applied to it’s listitems, they aren’t selectable.  Why is that and how do I fix it?

Update: In answer to my own question, the issue is because I should have been using a listitem-iconic style not listcell-iconic.  The listcell styles don’t support selection since you typically want to select the whole item not just one cell.

-Daniel

A few people have reported having problems with SocialMail  on Linux, specifically Ubuntu has been reported but I’m sure it’s a consistent problem accross distributions and a few other operating systems.

Investigation identified that the issue was related to windows tolerating differences in the capitalisation of filenames.  I really should have caught this initially, but I’m presently without a linux desktop to test things out on, so my apologies to all the Linux users out there.

All said and done, here is a new version which fixes the issue: socialMail-v013

-Daniel