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Introducing Soocial Labs

2008-07-08T14:27:00Z

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

2008-06-24T16:44:00Z

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

2008-06-09T11:32:00Z

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

2008-05-30T09:55:00Z

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

2008-05-28T12:57:00Z

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

2008-05-20T18:23:00Z

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

2008-05-20T13:00:00Z

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)

Menorca Tech Talk 2008

2008-05-16T10:01:00Z

I was privileged to be invited to come down to Martin Varskavsky’s farm in Menorca to attend the 2008 Tech Talks. It was an informal meeting between some of the most interesting web luminaries

It was a great time to talk and be inspired by the guys that have helped form the web as we know it. Hopefully Soocial will be a part of the next generation of formers ;-). One of the coolest things of Menorca is their crazy Cave nightclub, confusing interface cash machine, the awesome Argentinean barbeque boys toys and the stroll to the beach

Hope to see you there next year!

Soocial is in dry-dock for a few hours

2008-04-29T09:00:00Z

UPDATE: All system back online and working nicely now.

Image used under creative commons, original here (thanks Michael Brenton).

As you can tell Soocial is currently down during a few maintenance and performance upgrades. We hope to be back in the next few hours. This down time is needed to do a few upgrades to our infrastructure. We’ll be adding a number of different servers for our database, sync and webapp to improve the amount of traffic and users we can handle. This will improve the overal experience you have using Soocial.

We are currently:

Adding and moving to a dedicated sync server
Adding and moving to a dedicated database server
Adding and moving to a dedicated web app server
Moving to using EC2 for our sync bots (they talk with GMail and Highrise)
Using some new deploy recipes to be able to deploy even easier

Feel free to join us around our campfire for a chat.

We got kicked out of our office!

2008-04-24T19:00:00Z

So we need some help, we need a few days a week of office space during the month May, location doesn’t matter.

Recently we’ve had to do some musical chairs with our offices. The plan was that we’d be moving into one office, and that the current company would move into another, their occupants into yet another and so forth. However somebody, somewhere in the domino stones of companies forgot to get the internet arranged in the office they were supposed to move into and couldn’t move out. So, in this sense one “chair” was pulled away, leaving us standing. GRMBL! First we thought we’d work from home for a month, but after asking around we got a much better idea, that we use your offices!

As everything cool needs to have a name we’ve dubbed it Soocial Mobile Edition Spring 2008 (see our Enterprisey logo). What we are looking for are a few tables and chairs we can use for two or three days a week. Also good wifi and strong coffee would be great, other than that we’re not too demanding.

Our friends at Wakoopa and a few others (Nulaz?) have offered us a few days, but we are still looking for a few more places. So if you have (or know somebody that has) a few spare chairs and a good cuppa, please contact us on twitter @spif and give us a yell!

The invites are coming... really!

2008-04-20T21:00:00Z

... but only after we’ve got some initial scalability issues solved. We thought it would be good to give all of those waiting to be able to use Soocial an update on where we stand on getting more people into Soocial. As many commented after we got Techcrunched last week, we need to be able to handle a substantial amount of increased traffic. We are currently working hard on doing exactly that.

The current situation is that we have 4392 people in line for an invite (as of Sunday night 23:21 CET), we’ll be doing our best to send out the first batch of invites this Wednesday. Hopefully by the end of the week can have an extra 2000 users in Soocial.

We’ve been focussing on getting our product working right, without much attention on scalability, although we knew it would have to come sooner or later. We didn’t think it would hit us this fast.

We are currently splitting our webapp, database, and our sync bots to work on separate servers and using Amazon EC2 to handle the overload from the initial sync bots surge. (The initial sync with Highrise and GMail takes a lot longer the first time, as we create backups and crazy merging of all the contact in Soocial and Gmail/Highrise.)

We’ll also be optimizing some of our code to better handle the load, for example some of the sync bot code is pretty dumb. I’m sure we’ll run into much more possible optimization, but we want to find a balance between optimizing, debugging and creating new features.

If you feel you can help us out we have a few jobs open so send us your OPML along with your cv and vcf to stefan (at) soocial (dot) com.

UPDATE: The jobs are currently being worked off at a mad rate, but it might take some time before the changes from Highrise and GMail are digested and propagated. Also changes being pushed to GMail and Highrise will take some time, we are working to get these syncs much faster.

Soocial got Techcrunched!

2008-04-17T07:17:00Z

So Soocial was highlighted on TechCrunch today. It all went so quickly and soo many users that our server got overloaded in about 5 minutes. Our hosting company is awesome and found the culprit was our apache configuration¹. After 30 minutes all the 300 invites we’re gone. We will however be sending another batch of invites to those that have signed up via invites@soocial.com and our homepage. This morning I found us on the Japanese TC page, which provided me with the ability to make this screenie, I doubt I’ll be seeing that anytime soon.

Thanks for all the positive feedback and those of you who joined us in our campfire chat-room, sorry if we couldn’t answer all your questions.

UPDATE: The French and Japanese love us too!

¹ For those of you interested in the technical details: we switched from using a prefork to a mpm-server model. Then limited the ThreadStackSize to 1Mb, that brought us back reasonably quickly. We also increased the amount of Mongrels, hopefully we’ll be switching to mod_rails in the next few days.

Openness is a massive Blue Ocean

2008-04-11T14:00:00Z

One issue that continually returned at conferences we’ve been to in the last months (like SXSW and the Next Web) is the issue of data portability. People like Chris Saad, Chris Messina as well as Jeremy Keith are evangelizing the importance of creating interoperable services for end users.

For those of you wondering what data portability is about watch this movie and it will start to make things a bit clearer.

I was surprised that many of the audience seemed scared of data portability and confused about the need. These reservations seemed hinged on two aspects: privacy and monetization (sorry for the word – I’ll utilize the brilliant term ‘Making money’ from now on).

This article tries to answer both these questions.

For those of you wondering what data portability is about watch this movie and it will start to make things a bit clearer.

Privacy

Although the first question is easier to answer as it lies in not knowing that data portability is about giving the user more control of data not about giving your data to Google. As Chris Saad pointed out at The Next Web 2008: “A user would simply log onto a site, grant permission, and their friends, personal details and media – images, video, documents – are already populated and accessible – Nothing more complex than that.” The key word here is ‘grant permission’, data portability is about giving the user more control over their data not less¹. In essence the privacy question is rooted in ‘ignorance’ – that is the absence of key information what data portability is. It is great to see the likes of those mentioned above taking the important role of educating business deciders and end-users alike in this regards.

Making money!

Many times the same questions are being asked about data portability as they used to be asked about open source a few years back. How can anybody make money with open source software? How can you make money by giving software away free? Business models were not clear, the benefits of using open source however have never been doubted. With open source the answer is that although you don’t earn money with open source software, you earn money because of open source, look at the gazzilions of companies that are using open source technologies and are deemed ‘successful’.

In the same way you don’t earn money with opening up your data. In open data structures where users can use their own data across services will not directly cause companies to increase profits. However the enabling possibilities of providing open data is incredible. You make money because you use open data.

The unclarity about the business advantage of opening up closed data silos resembles an innovators dilema type problem. It is the case where only those companies that can find the right markets and organizational structure will survive². However the value creation that will take place due to the opening up of data is huge. Open data exchange will be like a currency that can power an economy. Just like open source software has enabled completely new areas of business, open data is just one aspect that will drive the added value for end users beyond economies of scale or network effects.

Call for action!

Apart from these benefits of open data – we need a better answer to the returning question of why it makes business sense to open up data silos, beyond “It sucks if you don’t”. There is a need for advocacy about the benefits of open data from a business perspective. However is it dataportability.org’s responsibility? Perhaps, but I think not. Their goal and purpose is to scout out technological possibilities and options and get the movers and shakers on board.

But we do need evangelists that will motivate the business case to existing businesses and explain why and how providing data portability features will enhance business. For this reason Soocial is starting an initiative called OAuthternoon’s where we answer the business question and the technical implementation examples – more info will follow soon. I’m sure there are parts of dataportability or other parties that are pushing this too, please feel free to notify me of these in the comments. For those wanting more background and food for thought about the changing economics and value creation of open data, here is some recommended reading.

¹ I loved Chris’ answer to a question from the audience who was concerned his site would lose users by using OpenID. Chris’ answer: “What so you have a website that provides just ‘Signing in’?”

² In my opinion large companies are correct in fearing to shoot themselves in their feet by opening up their data. However they have mush more to lose if they don’t. Finding easier transitions or ways to change could be an option, for example incubating new startups that will eventually overtake their business – this allows the startups to fight for and find their own ways to survive and thrive.

Flowers for the Beta!

2008-04-11T12:32:00Z

thanks Jan van der Lugt, we appreciate it and hope you enjoy using Soocial!

Soocial rocked The Next Web 2008

2008-04-08T12:00:00Z

This last week Soocial gave a kick -ass presentation at the next web conference in Amsterdam. Even though the very positive feedback we got was amazing, and phenomenal (thank you everyone for your kind words). We made a quick compilation of these twitters to spare you clicking on all the above links.

I’ll be posting some more thoughts about data portability in the next few days, which in our opinion is a lot more important than some crazy twitters.