Network Lighthouse

Thanks to Mozilla’s new philosophy of publishing new major releases every month or so, SocialMail has been a little behind the times for a little while.   However I am pleased to say that there is finally a new version which:

• Is Thunderbird 7 Compatible
• May work with Thunderbird 8, but not tested, I’ve just incremented the version compatibility as it should work
• Fixes some problems with international characters in contact’s names (Thanks to Frank who reported this)
• I can’t test this myself as I have no contacts with European names, so I’d appreciate any feedback

Thats it for the moment, I’ve been flat out with the day job, family stuff and other commitments, I’m just not getting much time for coding.  Hopefully that will change soon…

Get it here: socialmail-0.6.3b

-Daniel

Hi All,

Sorry for the long delay with posting an update, life gets a bit busy sometimes.
The SocialMail redevelopment is well underway here’s a summary of what I plan to release in the next few versions (no timeline as yet):
-New front panel showing a timeline of the contacts information (emails, tweets, etc) in chronological order
-Improving the display of all elements to be a bit crisper and more functional
-Context menu improvements
-replacing per network tabs with popup panels, cleaner look and less clutter
-A better way to attach contacts to social networks (this may have to wait until the 2nd new release)

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve pulled the SocialMail plugin from the Mozilla site. With some of the changes that have happened with one of the API providers, I decided that the current version was no longer publishable and so removed it. I will republish it once things are back on track.

In the mean time I will be publishing updates hear and hope to have a new Alpha out in a while for you all to play with.

-Daniel

Since moving to a single key for new SocialMail users, it’s become fairly clear that unless I put some controls in place the allocation of queries that I have would be used fairly early in the month meaning no “COMMUNITY” key (i.e. users without their own rapleaf key). In fact my first attempt at rate limiting to 500 queires per day, for the community not each user, mean that the daily allocation was used before 5pm.

Somethings have been changed to improve the situation, I’ve added caching to the server so if the same query is received more than once in a 45 day window the same data is returned (smaller windows are used for requests which don’t return data) to save an API call. Additionally I’ve changed the throttling to 25 queries per hour (again for the COMMUNITY key users) so that the spread is more even throughout the day.

I know this limit is low, but at this stage I don’t have any options but am presently investigating a couple of avenues. If you want more queires then the only option for the moment is to get your own RapLeaf API key and put it in the SocialMail config. When using your own key the throttling doesn’t apply.

Update: Thanks to the folks at Rapleaf, who have given us an increased limit.   So to spread this out I’ve upped the hourly limit to 50 queries, still not a lot but its better than where we were.

-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.

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