Network Lighthouse

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

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

Well it took a bit of doing, but Social Mail 0.0.7 is out now.   As promised this version includes the email/time graph so you know when your contacts are most likely to respond to you.  Here’s how it looks with wAvatar selected as the default image.

That’s the last major feature for the v0.0 series.  Once v0.1 is out I’ve got some ideas on how to further integrate the social networks into the interface, but before I start on them I’m hoping to have some suggestions on what people would like to see in future releases.

The next version v0.0.8 will address focus on making the upgrade process simpler, fix any bugs that are reported and add any small feature requests that come in.

Get socialMail-0.07

-Daniel

Well, it took a bit longer than anticipated (due to a lack of internet access for most of the week), but the next pre-release version of my new Thunderbird plugin “SocialMail” is ready to be tried out.

New in this version:

• Added collection of URL’s and phone numbers, although phone number identification still needs some work.
• Fixed some defects in the caching code so that api calls aren’t wasted
• Corrected an issue that caused profile images not to be shown.

You can get it here: socialMail-0.04
Minor update, it looks like some people are hitting an issue which causes the preferences screen to hang, here is a new release which fixes that problem:socialMail-0.04a

Now that the base of what I’m trying to acheive is done,  I’m going to start moving to a beta release, 0.1, at which point I’ll add SocialMail to addons.mozilla.org for wider distribution.  In the mean time please report any bugs or feature requests as a comment to this post.  Although bugs will take priority for the next few releases, I’ll consider new features as well.

For the 0.0.5 release, the only new feature planned is to add Gravatar support.

There has been a lot of talk about an outlook plugin “Xobni“, my wife used it for work and loved it and asked if there was something similar for Thunderbird.   After looking around I found that there wasn’t although there were several threads asking the same question.

With that in mind,  I’ve decided to start a new project, “SocialMail”, with the intention of bringing the functionality of the above mentioned outlook alternative.

Features that work so far:

• Real name discovery (from the local address book, rapleaft, email in that order)
• Social Network discovery and links to profiles where available
• Profile photo from social networks where available
• Email sent/received counts
• Contacts (who has this person been involved in conversations with)
• Previous Conversations
• Exchanged files (that you have received)

Be warned, that this is a pre-alpha release, attempt use at your own peril.

In order to use this you need the following

• Thunderbird 3.0b4 or newer
• Steel 0.1 extension (installation instructions can be found here)
• Manually create an addressbook in your profile with the filename “abook-1.mab”
• a rapleaf api key (get it from www.rapleaf.com)

With out any further delay here is the first release of socialmail for thunderbird: socialMail-0.01
socialMail-0.02 (Thanks to Ananth for noting the version incompatibility)

If you decide to give it a whirl, have any feedback or feature requests please leave a comment below.