During the past week we’ve been running into problems with changes to our backend that have been plaguing some of our users. Rest assured we have not deleted any data in Soocial. Even if data is missing on your device you will be able to restore it. This post explains what went wrong.
We added a new backend feature called ‘Contact Massaging’ that is necessary to deal with the device quirks. There was a pretty big bug in this feature.
Contact Massaging
Contact Massaging is needed to handle quirks in phones correctly. It enables us to handle quirks better and gives us more control of handling field labels correctly. This is because many phones don’t support certain fields and/or field labels, a notorious example is the ‘other’ field. Another example is the upcoming BlackBerry client that only handles 1 url and a maximum of 4 email addresses. To make sure a device handles contacts correctly we often have to strip out contact information the device cannot handle.
The bug: missing contact fields
The bug that was introduced here has to do with the fact that devices identify their own capabilities. However they often do this wrong, saying they don’t support specific fields when they do. So our sync server “correctly” strips out the “unsupported” fields leading to losing fields in devices when they really should be there. We have now fixed this issue and you should get all the fields back in your devices. This issue affected Nokia S60’s (all N and E series Nokia’s), some S40’s (like the Nokia 6300), some SonyEricsson and our own OSX client. We feel horrible about not catching this before we deployed the contact massaging.
Manual update needed in some cases
You should not be seeing this behaviour anymore. However if you do, it means you have updated a contact that has been incorrectly massaged. It is easy to fix this. First go to our webapp, find the device in your connections list and select “Force update” for that device. The next time you sync Soocial will push all contacts with correct fields back to the device and you will have the correct contacts in your phones.
Future updates?
Contact massaging will really shine for future updates of Soocial when we start supporting photo’s in syncing. With contact massaging we can save the original photo in the background while sending a compressed smaller version to your device saving storage on the device and reducing sync times. When you update the picture we can tell based on what has been sent to that particular device.
9 Comments
thank you for fixing! before it deleted 250+ email adresses from random contacts.. lucky osx gives a message when modifying so many contacts… so I turned soocial of last 2 weeks! now it works fine again! thnx
I’m not sure if this bug actually applies to me, but I did have an issue the other day when all but 5-10 of my 200+ contacts disappeared from my OS X address book. I managed to get to my work’s outlook (I sync from OS X to gMail to my blackberry (using google’s sync) to my work’s BES) before it had caught up and backed everything up — but I nearly lost all my contact info. Is this the same bug or something else?
Also: having a direct blackberry client would be sweet. Can’t wait.
Thanks for the incredible service.
-J
Hey Jon,
no, deleting that many contacts and not restoring them shouldn’t have happened.
Please send an e-mail to support [at] soocial.com with your username to see what could have happened. It’s pretty easy to make snapshots of your contacts on the Backup page and restore contacts with one click. Did you try that?
cheers,
Daniel
Soocial.com
@Jon Thanks for your mail. Found out in the logs that OSX actually sent a delete for every contact. And one got added: "Apple computers" Go figure? We are investigating to see what happened.
S60 type nokia. had to ‘force update’ to get is going again. lots of details re-appeared on my phone. still some fear of commitment but this seems to be going towards ‘going steady’ with soocial now. thanks for solving this!
I think Soocial is a fabulous idea and I have been looking forward to a real version for a while now. However, ever since I installed it, I realized that my mac does not talk to soocial too well (some fields such as additional work numbers or additional home numbers do not sync), soocial does not talk to GMail too well (firstname gets mangled if you save names such as John & Jane Doe) and so on return sync back from Soocial — you get many more contacts (now all mangled up) than you started with!
Also, the Outlook beta seems to have loads of issues. When I did install it — I was spooked by the number of changes and loss of data and so I reverted back to my old way of csv files import and export.
I shudder to think of what will happen if I attempt to sync my address book to GMail and outlook (at work).
I understand that getting all these apps to talk to each other must be crazy difficult, but Plaxo does a very very decent job of syncing my mac address book and outlook at work. I used it for many years until the donkeys at Plaxo decided to turn it into a facebook, in a failed attempt at gaining market cap.
Right after — my Fortune 500 company blocked access to plaxo. Social Networking sites are a no-no! I could not access plaxo anymore and was looking forward to Soocial — but looks like it will be a while before you guys have this figured out.
Until then — I’ll have to live with import/export to csv. Wish someone could get the guys at Mac and Windows development to agree on a standard (perhaps .vcf) so that phonebooks can finally be synced!
@andrew: the BlackBerry is very close. If you want to have a private alpha test we can send you the client. Just drop an email to support@soocial.com and refer to this comment. As far as syncing pictures go – we have the basic framework in place. Now we need to code the quirks and ways to handle different picture sizes correctly. Getting there but not quite yet. I do agree that it is quite a killer feature to have though.
@Kunal: Thanks for your long reply! It sucks to hear your personal experience with Soocial has not been hassle-free. We are constantly improving our service, especially the combination of different platforms has been hard to crack. That is one of the reasons we needed to implement Contact Massaging. We are nearing a big update to our Outlook client that will be much more stable and also sport an improved UI. As far as GMail syncing messing up names – there is little we can do about that as GMail just merges the first and last names and we have no reliable way to unmerge them after they’ve been synced. We are also working on that and Contact Massaging will take care of that to.
@David: thanks for testing and your positive feedback. Hearing that is worth all the extra effort we put into Soocial.
@Julo: I’ll have our support guy email you to get to the bottom of what is disappearing and why.
Getting there! Can’t wait for the BlackBerry client and for picture syncing; the latter (killer) feature is one I sorely miss at the moment from most sync clients.
After applying the ‘force update’ technique still having some contacts which show phone numbers in standard fields (e.g. ‘mobile’) and yet they do not get the number synced to the phone (Nokia E90). Can provide particulars for debugging if needed (PM me).