Network Lighthouse

Hi All,

I’ve been a little slack with updates, and for that I’m sorry.  Things have been a bit hectic so I haven’t been able to do as much development as I’d have like and I’m starting to toy with the idea of a new project.

Those things aside, I have some news to share with the SocialMail users.  Due to a change in direction RapLeaf will no longer be providing their Person API as of the end of this year, this means that SocialMail will have no way of doing email to Social Network lookups until a replacement service is found.

I am not sure on what the impacts of this will be to SocialMail overall, the Social Networking component was a large driver of what I’ve been trying to accomplish and loosing it will be a big blow.

My questions to the community are:

1. Does anyone know of any email -> social network lookup services with a (preferably free) API?
2. If SocialMail is to loose the dynamic social network lookup capability, where would you like to see SocialMail go next or is it time to hang up the flag and move on.

-Daniel

It’s been a long time between posts, I guess when you over commit something has to give and for me that meant SocialMail had to take a back seat for a while.

Now that things are settling down again, I’ve had a chance to update the Linkedin module for SocialMail so that it now works with the current SocialMail release, Thunderbird 3.1 and it works on Linux.  Other than that there are no significant changes, just a small tidy up of the preferences panel.

In related news, I’ve switched primary development platforms to Linux so future releases should work out of the box.

So here it is smlinkedin_v0.2

-Daniel

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