Soocial progress update
Since our last progress update a lot has happened. We are committed to being transparent in what we’re doing, thus now is a good time to give a quick progress update of what we’ve been working on and what’s coming. Even though things might seem quiet from the outside, rest assured we are working very hard on creating the best contact platform for everybody.
We’ve been working hard on a number of areas and will continue to work on these area’s until they are ready for deployment. The issues we’re working on are the following:
- GMail syncing: The first time you make any piece of software it is often exploratory – with our GMail engine that was certainly the case. We’ve just finished a rewrite of our engine code, much more stable and robust than the previous version and with a lot less magical bugs. The next step is to get this engine working with our new Queue system that the venerable Norbert has been hacking and he’ll be releasing it as open source on Github soon.
- Contact merging: One of the Soocial philosophies is that a clean address book requires constant maintenance. For this reason we use an automatic merging algorithm every time you sync. That means our end goal is that you don’t have to trigger a merge, we check for dupes during every sync. Our merging algorithm developed by Tijn is still doing it’s job nicely. 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 was taking waaaay too long if you have a lot of contacts which can result in a timeout and uncompleted synchronization sessions. We moved the merging onto EC2 instances that handles the merging jobs, thus allowing for better scaling. Also the speed of the merging code has been increased by a factor of up to 1200! Still ironing out some issues with duplicates here and there – but we’re getting very damn close to cracking the nut that all other sync solutions have failed at: good merging! To further make our merging perfect we added a merging tool to Soocial Labs. Play around with it and send us your feedback.
- Outlook & Blackberry syncing: This is something we’re very excited about as we didn’t think we’d be able to get this done so quickly. Thankfully it’s moving along nicely and we hope to have our first publicly available Outlook client somewhere at the end of August. The Blackberry client is also in early alpha and depending on the progress might also see a late August release. No promises though, these dates can be moved back – but we have already running alpha versions of both!
- Contact editing: The contact list, the contact editor and the contact search 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. This update will also see us adding Tags and Filters so you can choose which contacts are synced to each device. Additionally we’ll be adding multi edit/delete features and new fields. The trick here is to keep our interface as simple as it is now, it’s possible but hard to keep things simple.
- Scaling: As mentioned above we’ve moved more of our CPU intensive code off to EC2 thus allowing for us to put extra instance up when needed. Currently our Merging, GMail Sync, Highrise Sync and our Job scheduler run on separate EC2 instances we can easily duplicate when needed. Additionally a lot of our code has received some much needed optimization, increasing the efficiency while also fixing bugs. Another area that will see quite some performance increase is how we handle our Sync queue. We’re currently working hard on a replacement for DelayJob our ‘queue’ system of choice, but we’ll be rolling our own soon and open sourcing it on Github in the next weeks.
- Support: There will always be issues on which we need feedback from our users, the best place to do this is on Get Satisfaction. Because your questions and answers are publicly available it is more helpful to other users that have the same issues or questions.
We are very aware of Soocial’s rough edges and thus we’re 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)
UPDATE: Another worthy news flash is that we’ll be moving to Amsterdam in the next month, found some really nice and roomy offices on the Mauritskade with the good guys from Creative Crowds, IRL and Bemba.
Please go ahead !
Your service, that I've been testing for 4 weeks now (thanks again for inviting me !) really rocks !
Thanks Pierre for your kind words - it always surprises me how much it does to hear grateful users. Really cool!
My pleasure ! ;-)
Keep up the good work guys!
Congratulations, guys! Soocial just keeps getting better and better!
And big ups for the move too. Sounds like you're going to be sharing space with some interesting teams!
I want to get bumped up on the invite list... while I have just started my own blog, I am writing our tech column in the school newspaper starting this semester at Baruch College in NYC - a huge business school here in NYC, and the most diverse in the country. I use Mac & Windows and dabble in Linux, and would really like to use this product and write about it.