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New homepage and usability fixes

October 5, 2009 – 21:59

Soocial's new homepage

We’re very excited to be deploying a big release today to our web application. They are mostly cosmetic fixes and some new guides how to use Soocial. We’ll be adding more content in the next few days and have some more exciting things in the works.

One of the main area’s of improvement are the setup pages for Mac and Outlook, both have gotten a much easier too use interface that we believe will make it much easier to add Mac or Outlook connection. We’ll be adding the same setup screens for Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live and all phones in the next weeks as well.

Also you can see our homepage has a new video of what Soocial is, and there is a 3 minute demo on our tour page. In the demo you can see a preview of our iPhone app that is going to be released in the next few weeks. We also mention the Blackberry as a connection and we are very close to releasing our BlackBerry client very soon.

By Stefan Fountain | Posted in Home | Comments (3)

“Using Soocial to keep contacts in sync”

September 16, 2009 – 17:20

One of our faithful users, Carlos Eduardo, has written a blog post about his setup using Soocial to keep his address books in sync. Read it here.

Great to see Carlos capture (part of) our vision in one sentence:

  • [Soocial's] objective is to have a central platform and from it sync to multiple points via web APIs or local applications.

Let me add to that by saying that it’s key to provide a user-friendly and open solution to the way all of us, are currently using our address books. Foremost Soocial is a humble tool that works in the background to serve you correctly.

Another point is interesting is that Carlos is using Exchange in his setup as well. Carlos uses Exchange to sync his iPhone directly to his Google Account. (Suggestion to Carlos: you might want to try out Synthesis SyncML in the appstore for that, it’s free!).

We get many questions from (potential) users, how Soocial is better than Exchange or this or that and our standard answer is that we aren’t. We are not a replacement for Exchange, we are just different. One of the goals is to work alongside other solutions like Exchange, Plaxo, Google Sync or MobileMe and fill in the gaps that these solutions don’t cover.

We’ll be filling more gaps in the weeks to come, so stay tuned!

By Stefan Fountain | Posted in Home | Comments (3)

New Outlook client available

September 15, 2009 – 16:03

Today we have released a new version of our Outlook client. The new version is a bug fix release and we advice all user to upgrade their current version.

This upgrade has some major changes to the way the client syncs, and we have also upgraded our sync server to accommodate for this. For this reason the older version of the Outlook client will not sync anymore. Please upgrade your Outlook client to the current version 0.9.104.

Changelog of 0.9.104

  • Fixed settings for sync interval
  • Better support for Labels
  • Better support for multiple e-mail addresses
  • Better error handling
  • Improved feedback tab
  • Fixed some typo’s and removed graphic on “About” tab

Upgrade software button can be found on the Preferences tab.

How to upgrade

To upgrade follow these steps:

  1. Go to the Soocial Outlook client Preferences
  2. Press the button “check now” for new software updates
  3. Download the upgraded client
  4. Quit Outlook and the Soocial Outlook client
  5. Uninstall the old client, in Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove programs
  6. Install the new client you just downloaded
  7. Restart Outlook and you are set to go!

Feedback welcome through the Outlook feedback tab or at our community support site.

By Stefan Fountain | Posted in Home | Tags: | Comments (3)

Windows Live and Yahoo! support added

August 27, 2009 – 17:54
Yahoo! and Windows Live connections

Yahoo! and Windows Live connections

We are happy to be announcing the immediate release of new connections to Windows Live and Yahoo! Mail. Over the last few weeks we’ve internally been testing and improving these connections. This post briefly describes these connections and how they work, what fields are support and a few caveats.

The most important caveats are:

  1. Windows Live authentication needs to be refreshed every 30 days
  2. Yahoo! Mail connection only does a one-way sync from Yahoo! into Soocial.

Read More »

By Stefan Fountain | Posted in Home | Tags: , , | Comments Off

Improved interface: groups, labels and merging

August 6, 2009 – 17:01

Yesterday we updated our contact editor to include a third column on the left, as you can see in the below screenshot. We’ve also added a new way to edit labels which is a big improvement over the previous drop downmenu’s. Added to the already added improved way of handle merging released a few weeks ago, our interface is better than it’s ever been. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the changes — let us know what you think.

Below is a more detailed description of these changes.

Soocial's new three column interface

Soocial's new three column interface

Read More »

By Stefan Fountain | Posted in Home | Tags: , , , , , | Comments (1)

Please upgrade your Gmail connections

August 5, 2009 – 12:29
Gmail cleaned up their API and Soocial offers more reliable syncing with Gmail

Gmail cleaned up their API

A while back we create a new way to sync with Gmail using their improved API. The biggest improvement is that instead of syncing all the contacts (which included Google’s suggested contacts) we’re now only syncing the “My Contacts” group. This means you don’t get all suggested contacts messing up your address book.

Please go to your connections here and hit the upgrade button on the Gmail connection.

The upgrade also included some new fields and existing fields became more specific:

  • Names: structured data names. This means we can distinguish between first, last and middle names correctly. Even though the Gmail user interface doesn’t do this yet. You can edit your contacts in Soocial’s interface and the sync will be correctly made within minutes to your Gmail account.
  • Addresses: structured data as well, just like the names above. The same thing for the addresses is that the Gmail interface does not allow you to correctly edit these either yet.
  • Birthday support: full support for Birthdays – you can edit these correctly in the Gmail interface. And also pretty cool you can show your contacts’ birthdays in your calendar like this:

    Go to the Settings page, select the Calendars tab and click on “Browse public calendars”, then add the calendar “Contacts’ birthdays and events”.

    (See The googlesystem blog for more info)

  • URL support has been added. You can add as many URL’s as you like, keep in mind that many other devices (e.g. phones and Outlook) however don’t support more than one URL.

    • Automatically upgrading all old gmail connections is undesired, as we want you to remain in control. In this case it means that Soocial stops syncing with the ‘All contacts’ group and only syncs with ‘My contacts’. Therefore we added an upgrade button to our web-app to let users upgrade themselves. Please go to your connections here and hit the upgrade button on the Gmail connection. It will take about 5 minutes to upgrade your account and you’ll be set to go with all the new stability and correctness of the new gmail connection. If you don’t see the upgrade button that means you are already using the new Gmail connection.

By Stefan Fountain | Posted in Home | Tags: , | Comments (4)

Yikes, it’s that scary dialog again

May 11, 2009 – 10:03

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:

Mac OS X Sync services Conflict Alert Dialog

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.

By Stefan Fountain | Posted in Home | Tags: , | Comments (2)