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. (FIXED)
- 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. (SOMEWHAT FIXED)
- 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. (FIXED)
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)
Always good, when developers are transparent in their development. Keep up the great work!
(And, I've got that soocial account in the crosshair now... :P )
Soocial finally works for me (core functionality) and I'm very pleased that you're providing us these infos. Looking forward to the announced improvements!!
@Jo0lz - thanks!
@Simon - glad to hear that, what problems were you having? Will try and post some more of these summaries every once in a while, hopefully i'll be able to keep them shorter : )