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Yikes, it's that scary dialog again

2009-05-11T10:03:00Z

Dear OS X syncers…

... today we made a big update to our sync servers. Chances are that many of you will see this dialog box:

This is caused by the sync server sending contact information in a slightly different way (a better way™) than it used to. The OS X Address Book is scared of things that look like big updates so it will ask you to decide in its place what it should do. You can calm it down by pressing the “Sync Contacts” button while reassuring the address book with something like this: “Hush hush dear Address Book, it’s all right. It’s just Soocial syncing my contacts.”—preferably in a soft soothing voice.

Dear phone syncers, Outlook syncers…

... because this is a big update it might take a few attempts to log in or get your contacts synced. The first sync right after the big update might also take a minute longer than what you’re used to but after that, things will be as fast as before.

Highrise syncing back up for all users

2009-04-17T14:47:00Z

As the title above says our Highrise sync is back up for all users. As we described here we had to switch off the Highrise syncing due to a bug in our syncing logic. However all of that is fixed and you should be able to happily sync highrise again.

If you do run into trouble please email us or post a support request on our community support site.

Highrise syncing disabled

2009-04-09T15:41:00Z

Unfortunately our syncing with Highrise has been switched off the last few weeks.

There was a bug in our syncing with Highrise that destroyed data in Highrise accounts. The bug occurred if a user updated a contact and Soocial would sync it to Highrise by first deleting and then adding it as a new contact. For Highrise this is a serious problem because data is attached to the People you have in Highrise – for example your Cases. This bug was fixed quickly however the guys at 37signals (correctly) felt the bug was so serious they decided to disallow our syncing until the fix was proven.

Of course we take these bugs seriously and have been working together with 37signals to resolve this issue. Right now we have about 15 users syncing again with Highrise and syncing is working correctly and stable.

We want to respect 37signals request to wait with switching on all users until they feel the issue is correctly resolved and proven to be working. We are only switching on those accounts that users directly request to be included in the test group. If you want your account to sync again with Highrise let us know and we will add you to this list.

We hope all Highrise users can soon sync again and feel safe about using Soocial to do this. Thank you Highrise users for your patience in helping us improve Soocial!

New Outlook client released

2009-02-10T16:10:00Z

After months of really hard work, we are proud to release our new Outlook sync client. Download the new version from our Outlook connection setup and let us know what you think!

From Alpha to Beta

We released the alpha version on November 12th last year. We got loads of positive feedback and saw a lot of traction. However we quickly realized that we needed to change our fundamental approach to getting software to work nicely alongside Outlook. So it took longer than we anticipated to bring things to a better and more stable beta state.

Changes

We have improved the look-and-feel, added an easier way to provide us with feedback and improved a lot of behind the scenes stuff. The actual syncing logic now works independently from Outlook and the only visible part of Soocial within Outlook is a small ribbon that you can remove if you want. The screenshots below show the new interface and features.

Version number is lowered

The new version is 0.9.86 and it can be downloaded from the connections screen in Soocial. A quick note about the new version number – we have switched version numbering schemes. The previous version is 1.1.14, the newer version has a lower number. Even though this is inconsistent we want to more accurately reflect the beta state of the software. We will move up to version 1.0.x once we feel confident enough that the client is no longer in beta status.

Screenshots

BlackBerry pre-beta client available

2009-02-06T11:03:00Z

We have been working like a small pony on creating a BlackBerry client. The good news is that we’re close to ironing out the final details. We’ve had quite some people sign up to test the pre-beta BlackBerry client, but we’ve still got some slots left!

So if you’re interested in helping us to make it better please send an e-mail to support and we’ll send you an invite. Happy testing!

Bug report: missing fields in some devices

2009-01-30T14:34:00Z

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.

The CTO is dead, long live the CTO!

2009-01-29T19:35:00Z

We have some sad news, no nobody died(!), and some exciting news!

Simon de Haan will be leaving the Soocial Head Quarters in Amsterdam and moving to Cape Town, South Africa. Simon will stay a Soocialite and a part of our team, but the 6000 miles distance means that he won’t be able to carry the responsibilities of CTO. We will miss him, but not the music he’s been playing this last week.

The exciting news is that today, Soocial announces a new Chief Technology Officer, Norbert Crombach. Norbert will be leading Soocial’s technology strategy and kicking (soocialite) ass to roll out some really exciting features for you Soocial users this coming year.

Norbert Crombach, posing as CTO of Soocial

We’ll be throwing a goodbye party for Simon tomorrow (Friday the 30th) at 15:30 hours. Amsterdam start-up scene you’re welcome!

UPDATE: Location of our offices for those of you keen to come: Piet Heinkade 179, Amsterdam

Planned maintenance on January 28th

2009-01-27T22:17:00Z

We are planning 3 hours of maintenance on the 28th of January from 09:00 until 12:00 CET (that’s 3 AM to 6 AM EST) to migrate our database to a larger server.

We’ve recently deployed a few new backend features including full contact history, similarity calculations and contact massaging. These features combined gave our systems quite a bit of extra load. We have been optimizing our code a lot but still require more database capacity. If you want specifics you can pester @tmacedo for them.

UPDATE (11:54): All systems back online, nice performance increase so far!

Amazon Web Services meeting today

2009-01-21T12:34:00Z

We are involved in an AWS event that was setup in the last few days. If you are curious about Cloud Computing and want to meet developers and such as and the like….

Simone Brunozzi (pictured above), Amazon Web Services Technology Evangelist for Europe, will present Amazon Web Services and answer to your questions and so will ourselves, MyNameIsE, Marvia and Wakoopa.

See you there! (More info here)

UPDATE: I have been notified that the above picture is not Simone. See below for the real slim shady infamous Mr. Brunozzi!

Soocial update

2009-01-07T15:22:00Z

Just a quick blog post to let you know of some updates we’ve been working on. We’ve been very busy over the last weeks working on the following:

Merging now possible in our webapp
Better Outlook support (new version coming out soon)
Getting ready for our BlackBerry client
Contact massaging (needed to filter unsupported fields in some devices)
More scaling & performance improvements

Let us know what you think about the changes on our Get Satisfaction community support site Expect a longer blog post soon highlighting these recent improvements.

Welcome new users!

2008-11-14T23:28:00Z

After all the positive press coverage from us presenting at UnderTheRadar and the Outlook release as covered by TechCrunch, we’ve just been featured on LifeHacker.

We’ve been seeing a lot of new signups and that is awesome! To ensure everyone a smooth syncing experience with Soocial we’re throttling the account confirmation emails a bit.

Naturally, with all the new signups, we’re receiving quite a few support emails and questions in our support mailbox and at GetSatisfaction. We’re working hard on responding to them all but unfortunately it can take a bit longer than you might be used to.

So hang in there, enjoy Soocial, and if you’re in need of support we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Soocial on TechCrunch and at Under the Radar

2008-11-13T15:26:00Z

Yesterday was a pretty crazy day. First of all it was crazy because we were gearing up to release Outlook as an alpha. Then we got TechCrunched – how ever the story was posted 5 hours early – there was still some stuff to fix so we asked them to pull the story. When the time came it got reposted but I think we missed some traffic from it – but we still got a lot of attention yesterday, as a startup attention is good. ;-) We were also on The Next Web but beware it contains crazy monkeys doing the haka.

What was really cool is to see how far we’ve come since 6 months ago when we got TC’ed for the first time. We couldn’t handle the load but flew through it today.Great team effort on getting everything out there and ready for the mass of visits!

We were also a presenting company at Under the Radar. Being at under the radar was amazing: the vibrancy of all the startups, press and VC’s really shows of why being in the valley is a competitive advantage. Our presentation went very well – we got heaps of positive reactions and we were happy to be able to talk to many potential partners. The presentation can be viewed here but it’s pretty useless as the video skips and the audio is too lo-fi.

It’s been great to see Soocial’s user count grow like crazy today we hope that trend continues. In any case welcome all new users and we hope that Soocial provides your with value that you won’t be able to live without.

Soocial update: You have invites!

2008-11-03T14:43:00Z

As many of you will have noticed on Friday we handed out 5 invites to all our existing users. All our existing users are getting 5 invites. Find them here: http://www.soocial.com/invites in your account now. We will be giving new users invites soon as well – trying to manage the influx of users as best we can. As soon as we think it wise we’ll be giving more invites.

Why invites your friends?

Three reason why you should send out invites to your friends. Your friends get:

full two-way sync between phones, Macs and GMail
automatic backup of their contacts, never lose contacts again!
automatic merging of duplicates, no pesky doubles
edit contacts on a big screen, no more tiny phone edit menus
it’s free!
will soon get Outlook and Blackberry support too!

Ok, ok, more than 3 reasons (and there are heaps more!) but you get the idea. ;-)

Progress update

A lot of work has been done in the last few weeks, the following updates to Soocial have happened:

Multiple delete
Scaling & performance improvements
Improvements in merging
Better phone support: Nokia Series 60 (E61, N80, N95, N96 etc.)

Outlook and Blackberry support is underway, we have functioning alpha’s running internally — hope to be able to release soon!

A bit silly…

Through some silly error on our part we didn’t start our merging jobs correctly so everybody trying to sync didn’t see their contacts show up in the webapp. This was because the queue wasn’t working and thus the sync would keep contacts in transit forever. We have fixed the problem, put some warnings in place to make sure it won’t happen again and now the merging queue’s have nearly caught up with all the new users syncing for the first time.

Sorry about that. ;-)

Stefan Fountain's Keynote at FOWA|Expo 2008 in London

2008-10-15T15:04:00Z

Last week the whole Soocial team went over to London and attended the Future of Webapps conference. And we had a great time at FOWA last week. It was great meeting and talking to all the movers and shakers of tomorrows web. (Cough) We got a lot of positive feedback on our presentation and had many good inspiring talks about mobile devices, services and contacts.

Have a look at the video from our presentation, the shorter highlights version is here. Feedback and corrections are welcome. I’m sure I said something controversial in my speech and we are always open to correction.

Impeccable Timing

2008-09-26T12:43:00Z

The Soocial web servers are up and running again. There was some trouble at the data center in New York around 12:30 am GMT which affected our service as well.

No data has been lost, your contacts are safe.

We’ve been working really hard the last couple of hours to get our servers back up. Our servers are in a private network, an extra feature that has security and speed benefits, and the gateway to this network was broken which required some rewiring of the machines in the network. While we’re not happy with the downtime we are relieved that the service is up and running again. We’re taking some time to evaluate what has happened and what we can do to avoid such problems in the future.

It seems like Murphy has been proven right once again as this downtime came at the worst possible moment. This afternoon Stefan will be on stage with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, at Picnic’ 08. Soocial will be showing the audience what it’s like for a startup to use Amazon Web Services and after that we’ll have a short Q&A session with Werner about why we’re not fully hosted on Amazon’s web services platform and what it would take for us to do so.

Werner was slightly amused to hear of our downtime problems right after we’d just convinced him of the speedy support we usually experience with our hosting partner.

We’ll be taking EC2 and the other range of Amazon’s AWS services into consideration as we evaluate these last few hours.