Soocial iPhone app, out or not?

October 27, 2009 – 20:36

We’ve caused a bit of confusion today and I’d like to set the record straight. Is the Soocial iPhone app out or not?

Technically the app itself is ready and works nicely, however our sync server has proven not to be ready. So we have decided to block syncs from the iPhone for a few days. This is very unfortunate because we’ve been anticipating this release for a while. But we find it more important to not cause damage to your address book and thus have made this decision.

So what happened?
In short the syncing will break on photo’s that are attached to contacts. We could leave it up and let the users decide but the bug is major enough and we care a lot about your address books that in some cases it will replace contacts and thus leave you stranded without them. This is totally unacceptable and we are deeply sorry this has been a hassle for any of you affected.

We are working very hard on a fix and will let you know here when the issue has been solved.

For those of you that have experienced problems and missing contacts, rest assured your contacts _are_ safely stored in Soocial and once we have this issue fixed a simple sync will restore everything correctly.

UPDATE: The Soocial iPhone application is back in the AppStore and syncs well. However the initial sync can take a while (especially if you have many pictures), so long in fact that it can time out and then the sync can fail. In some circumstances this can also cause loss of data.

For this reason we advise only the adventurous to try it out for now, until we give the go ahead that it is safe.

By Stefan Fountain | Posted in Home | Comments (6)

BlackBerry Beta sync client now available!

October 20, 2009 – 21:21

We are very excited to be able to release our BlackBerry sync client as a public beta today!

After many months of hard work, bug searching, finding and fixing we have decided to release the BlackBerry client as a beta today. For now it will work on BlackBerry devices that run OS 4.6.x, we will now focus on getting it to run perfectly on 4.2 and higher. Please go to your connections page (after logging in) and see how to setup your BlackBerry with Soocial.

Please let us know what you think of the client and how it performs for you. If you are using a different BlackBerry OS than 4.6.x then be careful but feel free to install it and let us know if it works for you. We know there are a few devices that will work with this client even though they don’t run OS 4.6.x. However we would like to hear if you find that the client runs on your non-4.6.x BlackBerry device, so please let us know here.

Other updates to made public today include:

  1. Signup flows for adding Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail have been improved
  2. Added a signup page for our upcoming businesses accounts
  3. Added a public page with a list of supported phones

Stay tuned for more exciting news in the coming weeks!

By Stefan Fountain | Posted in Home | Tags: , , , | Comments (5)

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)