Network Lighthouse

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