It’s been a long time since we last put out an update besides a code fix. But that’s all because we’ve been working hard at version 2.0, which is now live and available for use. While 2.0 does have quite a few new features, the biggest reason for the upgrade was simply that our previous architecture wasn’t really all that great.
1.0 was set up in a manner so that whenever you come to our site, we fetched your friends, their data, as well as your data in a live fashion. This made for real-time updates from those sites, but unfortunately also meant that if the service was down in real-time, so was our ability to pull those updates.
We’ve now completely re-written the way that we call sites, and now everything is done throughout the day. Whenever you log into the site, you’ll see a backlog of stuff that’s already occurred…and as you’re sitting on the site, we go out and look for new updates from your sites, then as soon as we have them, deliver them without the need of your refreshing the page. A picture of this is below…
Auto-updating
While you’re sitting on the site, we go and look for new updates from you and your friends. We’re updating everything every 1 minute, so you stay constantly up to date with the sites and services you’ve configured into your Socialthing! account.
De-duplication
With all kinds of new posting tools like Ping.fm and Hellotxt (well, and Socialthing!), it’s kind of annoying when you see something coming from Twitter, and then Facebook and then Pownce. We’ve built in de-duplication for this stuff…so now you simply see the icons of the services that the update went out on, instead of duplicates of the update.
Replying and Pownce Conversations
Now it’s even easier to reply to messages from your friends, as we pop up the reply directly within the update. You’re even able to see existing conversations going on at the service right from within Socialthing!
Keeping people “quiet”
If there’s someone that likes to tweet a lot, we give you the ability to keep their updates stuck together, then how many you want to see before we start hiding updates. However, if we ARE hiding updates, you’re able to see where they’re coming from.
Advanced Friendstream Sorting
You’re able to keep your friendstream sorted in two different ways. Obviously we give you the ability to sort by “time” which means it will be in a purely chronological fashion. But we also give you the ability to sort your friendstream by person, which means that we are going to group the updates from them into one big batch. Then you can tell us how much time in between those updates you’re going to allow before we group… You’re even able to tell us how many updates you want us to show before we start hiding them (like two pictures above).
Using existing avatars
When we pull your accounts in, you’re able to tell us which site you want us to pull your avatar from. This makes it easy to update your “profile picture” on our site without really having to do all the work to actually upload anything to us. With this interface, you’re able to quickly switch between icons as well.
User Profiles
We’ve added user profiles. You’re able to expose the accounts that you’ve set up in Socialthing! to a public profile. This profile will be at a URL like http://USERNAME.socialthing.com. You can check out an example profile at http://indiekid.socialthing.com.
Sharing stuff with your profile
We’ve got new privacy functions inside of Socialthing! on a per-account level. You’re able to tell us what accounts you want seen as part of your public profile, as well as WHO sees them.
Favoriting
You’re now able to mark something in the Friendstream (or your own Lifestream) as a favorite. Right now this favorite just stays on Socialthing!, but we’re adding the ability to send those favorites back to the service that the update came from very soon…
Updated posting
This one was pretty requested…we made it so that you can post an update without going to a separate page altogether…just comes up as a popup now.
New iPhone Version
There’s also a brand new version of our iPhone web app. It now allows you to favorite, reply and read more stuff than you could before. It also is pretty optimized for EDGE now and should load much quicker than before.
Re-adding services
We have brought back del.icio.us, Digg, Last.fm and YouTube. We’re also working really hard at bringing you lots of new services in a really fast manner. We’ve got quite a few in the pipeline.
Even more coming!
We’re not done at all. We’ve been working on tons of other sweet features recently and have them ready to go, we’re just going to release them over time so you’re not really overwhelmed with everything. There’s a lot of great ideas that have been suggested by our users that have made it into the app, into upcoming features.
We hope you really enjoy 2.0 as much as we do and can’t wait to get you even more new things!
