Introducing Soocial Labs

One of the cool things of running a startup is the awesome feedback we get from users. Thank you everybody for that. In order to make the feedback easier and more fun we are release a playground area for Soocial called labs. Check it out here. Our idea of labs is for us to do some experimentation but also make it easier for users to debug areas of Soocial and get feedback on them.

The urge to merge?

The first of these is a contact merging tool – although a bit rough around the edges it is the same algorithm we use to merge your contacts in a sync. One of the things that we are aiming to perfect is contact merging and we feel that while we are doing a pretty good job some edge cases are tripping us up. We found have found quite a few, but would love to have your help to finding more.

We’ll be adding more tools here over the next months as we see it fit our purpose of creating an awesome contact platform. If you have some cool idea’s for a mini-app let us know and we’ll see what we can do!

Doing less the good way

We often get the question or remark that Soocial is pretty ok, but actually more a feature than a sustainable business. Basically the question is whether Soocial is “just” an aspect of a product or if it can be a product itself. Compared to other products like Apple’s MobileMe and myFunambol our product offering is ‘less’, at least in regards to the amount of features. However Soocial has an important added value that is inherent to the fact that we do less: we have to play well with others. And playing well with others is going to be very very important to solve the address book problem.

Soocial: product or feature

The ‘slimness’ of Soocial is a good thing – even a competitive advantage over similar products. This is the reason comparable products haven’t got it right, because they considered contact management as “just” a feature. The raison d’être of Soocial is in getting the address book right – that is our innovation.

The idea of Soocial is that we do contacts – and do it right – then play well with others. Plugging in easily into existing sites thus taking the burden of handling contacts away. Let contact management be our headache not yours. That is the core of Soocial’s narrow focus and added value. Compare it to Amazon Web Services and SaaS.

Keep it clean

So if Soocial is a product then what are the features? Syncing, Backing-up, Sharing, Cleaning, Merging and Organizing contacts – and doing it right – is an immense value that internet users need. In short choosing a narrow product focus allows us to solve the problem at a much deeper level.

Part of Soocial’s value proposition is helping users clean their address books, providing some sort of ‘magic’ that helps keep contacts sane. Things like auto cleaning, deduping and formatting your phone numbers in human friendly ways are all things offer added value. These features will compete head-to-head in a qualitative sense with MobileMe and Funambol in regards to their contact syncing features.

What of MobileMe or Funambol?

Both MobileMe and myFunambol are good products or have the potential to be, I don’t mean to knock them. However there is also a problem they need to face, that has not been addressed yet.

A quick example: What if you want calendar and push email syncing of MobileMe but keep storing your photo’s in Flickr, not MobileMe? Even though there will undoubtedly be linking tools between MobileMe and Flickr, it is still a drag to have two places for your photos or to have to choose between them.

Interoperability is the key.

Both products offer more syncing features: contacts, calendar, notes, push email and (in case of MobileMe) photos. But both products will also be harder to use in combination with other similar offerings. Soocial doing less means we must do that better, we must offer a better contact management experience. However it also means there is more room for others. This is especially true for data like contacts which is used so often and in such a wide variety of places. Interoperability is going to be a very important aspect of solving the address book problem.

Screencast: Phusion Passenger install

Within Soocial’s architecture we use Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails) to power our webapp. This screencast shows where in our architecture we use Phusion Passenger and how to install it for your webapp.

OAuth the Awesome

Last Tuesday Spif and myself were at Kings of Code and I had the opportunity to hold a short talk on OAuth and why such an authentication mechanism is so crucial.

What is basically boils down to is that it’s brilliant that 2008 is shaping up to be a year of ‘openness’ with OpenID, Open Social, open API’s etc … but the thought of all this openness without a proper authentication mechanism that gives the users full control is scary to say the least.

Far too many sites, especially social networks, are asking for usernames and passwords to services such as online email in order to find buddies in the network by matching them with email addresses in your address book. LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, for example, will all try and grab your contacts in GMail in order to add them as contacts.

Now there’s nothing wrong with sharing data between services, I fully encourage it, but surrendering control by giving your username and password is insane.

This is one of the problems that OAuth tackles. OAuth is an authentication mechanism that gives the user full control of their data, who gets access to it and when. It does so without sharing passwords.

We at Soocial are fully committed to giving our users full control over their contact data and feel that this topic is one that needs more attention. To get people up to speed, we’re organizing an informal afternoon where business deciders and developers can learn about OAuth. Leave your email address at OAuthternoon and we’ll let you know when we have the details sorted.

For those interested, here are the slides of my talk on OAuth

Of battles and humility

I just finished reading the rather lengthy (but excellent) post by Chris Messina on the battle of the future of the social web regarding the Facebook and Google showdown

We previously wrote about how open data is a massive blue ocean of possibilities for value creation online. Chris basically says the same, but goes a big step further, he challenges Facebook and Google to make a truce get over their differences and together create a larger pie even if you have to share more.

Varian & Shapiro in their enlightened book Information Rules (1998) put it this way:

An agreed-upon standard may lead to a far bigger overall market, making for a larger pie that you can split with your partners. Don’t be proud; be prepared to cut a deal even with your most bitter enemy.

So in this case humility from both Google and Facebook will increase the value for all users and maybe as a reward increase the wealth for Facebook and Google?

What do you think?

(BTW The image is a ironical, we are so romantic as to believe and hope Facebook and Google will find a truce in this.)

Speaking at The Web and Beyond

Soocial is speaking at the Web and Beyond in Amsterdam this thursday May 22nd. This event promises to be inspiring, we’re very much looking forward to going. Our talk will be on how opening up your users’ data can actually create value for users. Sound boring? It won’t be as this is an exciting opportunity for UX specialists to take up arms against the artificial limitations our users are faced with in their experience of online applications.

If you haven’t planned on going, perhaps reconsider and check out the Web and Beyond.

Soocial's progress

I guess it’s somewhat the nature of a startup that there’s always a plethora things going on when on the outside things might seem quiet. We’re committed to being transparent and as such I thought I’d write up a short technical summary of what we’ve focused on this past week and what we’re working on this coming week.

Many of you noticed we had trouble keeping up with all the requests due to the article on Techcrunch and as such we’ve focused on making Soocial scale better.

What we’ve done is split Soocial into a number of different applications that each run on their own machine, so now we have a dedicated server for the website, a server for the phone and address book synchronization, a separate database server and we’re making extensive use of Amazon’s EC2 for synchronizing to GMail and Highrise.

All systems are quite stable at the moment and we’ve gotten round to working on some long standing and very annoying issues, some of which were reported in our Get Satisfaction support section.

The issues we’re working on are the following:

• Address editing bug: We’ve fixed the bug where editing an address would create a new address entry for every single change made. (FIXED)
• Contact merging: Our contact merging algorithm developed by Tijn is working very well and it allows us to perform a merge between similar contacts while we are syncing. If you sync a new contact that can be merged into an existing contact, Soocial will happily accept it, merge it with the matching contact, and send you the update for that contact in the same synchronization session. The only issue is that it can take too long if you have a lot of contacts which can result in a timeout and incompleted synchronization sessions. We’re working on a solution that will allow us to do this faster by splitting this merge jobs over a bigger number of workers, we’ve taken lessons from Starbucks in this regard.
• Contact editing: The contact list, searching and the contact editor have served us well but they’re giving us headaches with future updates we’ve got planned, especially with regard to adding tagging and filtering. We’re working on a major overhaul which will simplify the editor both on a technical and on a usability level as well as allowing us to introduce these future features.
• Support: Soocial’s support section needs some serious loving and it’s pretty clear that we’re not so passionate about building a kick-ass support system. We’re very happy with Get Satisfaction and we’ll be working on integrating their service with our support section to make it truly hassle-free, which is something we’re very passionate about.

We’re very aware of Soocial’s rough edges and so are very thankful for you, our beta testers. We love getting your feedback and always try to get back to you within a day, so please do keep those emails coming!

(ps. We regularly publish status messages and bugfixes on our Soocial twitter account, make sure you follow us to get the latest updates)