Andréuí's dashboard

Yeah that's on its way...got the back end architecture almost complete now for this feature to work...

This sounds great, now just let me add custom RSS feeds into my lifestream too so that I can add my blog, viddyou, etc as needed and then regurgitate all this out onto my blog site - and do it fast or else I'll beat you with a custom WordPress Lifestream plugin (the current options are too restrictive).

It appears 2 of micronauta's friends happened to receive invites after he signed up. These invites could have come from anyone who sent an invite to their address. I can assure you we have no access to your email address book, as we don't ever ask you for credentials belonging to an email provider, and as Matt mentioned earlier, none of the API's provide email addresses when we request user info.

Moving forward, please know that we hold the user's privacy above all else. We are a trust-based service. If we were to betray that trust, even once, in the most insignificant way, we fail you as the user, and will not survive as a company and a service. Quite frankly, I like to use the site myself, and would like it to stick around :)

waitin 4 micronauta answer! BTW, no one of my contacts received anything. Maybe Facebook did that? Or Twitter?

An email I just sent to micronauta:

Just to put your mind at ease, here's why we can't actually do that.

1. We don't know the email addresses of your friends. There's no way for us to actually get this. Any of the services that you add don't actually give us the email addresses of your friends, it would actually be a massive privacy violation.

2. I'm not sure what email service you use, but there's no way for us to dive into your contacts and find out who they might be, then send them email.

3. We're not sending unsolicited mail on your behalf. Currently (and it is a limitation) our invite email is very ambiguous, meaning when you get it, you don't know if it was sent to you via the main Socialthing! server, or by someone else, just sending out an invite code. For instance, every user can invite their friends via our invite interface. It may have been that they received invitations from other people as well, or if they were signed up for our mailing list, periodically we will send out invites to anyone that may have been on that list.

We will do as you wish and delete your account from our service, but I can assure you that there is no way that we have spammed your friends, no way that they have received an invite without some explicit action taken by us (via our mailing list) or by one of their other friends, who may have sent an invitation.

We have had a lot of users sign up via the FayerWayer blog, and it's likely that someone else that got accepted may have sent an invitation to one of your contacts that way. It's purely a coincidence.

I understand if you would prefer not to tell us, but if you could let us know of the email addresses of the people that we supposedly spammed, I would like to send them an apology email myself and try to track down how you might have gotten the impression that they got spammed.

This is against our nature, our culture, and more importantly our TOS, and with that, definitely not something that we want to do.

Sorry that you got that impression.

Ok Matt, thanks for your comment.

Looking forward to micronauta's reply.

Hey there micronauta. I can assure you that we didn't spam your contacts. There is no way for us to email all of your contacts, as we don't know their email addresses. As for sending them messages via various services, our TOS states that we wouldn't do such an act.

Can you provide us insight as to why you think we spammed your friends with invites? I'm really curious as to how that may have come up.

This is something we are vehemently against, there is no way we will ever spam any of your contacts at all.

Whoa! This is scary... someone care to elaborate? What happened??

Related to this, will Socialthing be switching over to OAuth implementations then for Twitter and the others once they come online? (Similar to Flickr's external Auth process)

Cool. Then I can use the service without providing you my password. Don't take it personally, of course. :) Just make sure you clear that up on the screen where you ask me my username. "to be able to see direct msgs, pvt content, we'll need your password too", smthn like that.

Oh, and this could work until twitter implements OAuth. Notice the lack of "if". hahaha I'm an optimist.

Great work!

Yes! It does. I would be happy with that. :)

So we'll have two different RSS feeds for this.

One for you that can be public

One for your friends' updates that will be hashed with a secret key, so that it's private to you

Make sense?

So we're doing two things with this:

Add an RSS feed to your page - this will be done through the serivces page and it will show up on your public profile (once they go live)

Attach an RSS feed to a friend - this will be done in two places, first through the lifestream, second through the services page, but this would basically mean that you've said this RSS feed is associated to this person, and then whenever that RSS feed is updated, you see it as though that person published the content...

Make sense?

Hey there. The password isn't to claim, it's so that we can show you direct messages and send stuff back to Twitter. We're not trying to be an aggregator...we're trying to be a conduit to the rest of your social networks, and so we'd like you to be able to publish from our platform as well.

Now, I will mention that we really don't want your password...we're not in the game of doing that, but right now, for API authentication, it's the only way. Check out our blog post here: http://blog.socialthing.com/2008/03/1...

And as a sidenote, soon you'll have the option of only giving us your username and we'll grab your public stuff only, but you won't be able to post or get direct messages.