Ben's dashboard

Ben replied on April 09, 2008 23:31 to the problem "Text input focus "jumps" from comment/reply box on Pownce... I think it's SocialThing "scanning" input for possible referral? Or not?" in Socialthing:

minmax2k, if this is a problem that is happening only on Pownce (that is, on pownce.com, and not on socialthing.com), then it is something unrelated to the fact that you have an account on socialthing.com.

If it is happening on both sites, then it is probably something bug-related in firefox 3. Does this behavior exist in other browsers or just firefox? And also, can you reliably reproduce the problem? If so, what are the steps to reproduce it?

Thanks for your help.

Ben replied on April 05, 2008 04:42 to the idea "API outage notification system?" in Socialthing:

Great suggestion! We've thought about this before (and ran into the same conceptual problems). To solve the problem of informing the unaware (or uncaring), maybe it could be on another page, so that when you suspect something is amiss, you might check to see if that particular service is having issues.

Assuming we get the usability down, there's still the issue of actually determining the state of a service. Currently, it's sometimes tough to determine this -manually-. What would be nice is a method that -always- is up, detailing the status of an API: sort of like the programmatic equivalent to a human-readable "maintenance" page.

In fact I'll implement that method in our API come to think of it. Heck, if we get good enough at determining the state of external API's, maybe we'll even throw that in there too.

Good point.

Ben replied on March 29, 2008 18:41 to the question "Duplicates in Lifestream" in Socialthing:

jbminn, so what you're saying is that our de-duping worked on some of your cross-posts(such as the one you posted above), but not all? If that's the case, we would definitely like to know specifically the content of those posts so we can perfect our algorithm.

Ben set one of Ben's replies as an official response to "Duplicates in Lifestream" in Socialthing

Ben replied on March 29, 2008 07:15 to the question "Duplicates in Lifestream" in Socialthing:

ok, so this happens already, though it's hard to tell how. What you need to do is click on the name of the accounts you wish to "combine". Rename them to the same name. (if one of them is Facebook, rename them even if it's the same name. That is, rename "John Doe" to "John Doe".) once you've done this, we will automatically "de-dupe" duplicate activities.

We are fully aware that this isn't intuitive enough and have already been working on a much improved interface for collapsing multiple accounts to one "real-life" person. In the meantime, at least the clunky interface works.

Ben replied on March 29, 2008 03:00 to the question "Duplicates in Lifestream" in Socialthing:

Duplicates as in the exact same activity by the exact same account on the same service? Or duplicates across different services for the same real-life person?

Ben set one of Ben's replies as an official response to "More Facebook updates" in Socialthing

Ben replied on March 29, 2008 02:59 to the idea "More Facebook updates" in Socialthing:

Joe, we would love nothing more than to include more data from every service we support. Unfortunately, Facebook is notoriously strict with its data. We currently provide the most data one can currently provide with Facebook's current API.

We work with every site we support to try to open up their API to provide as much useful data as possible. It's certainly possible that the options you suggest might be available in the future, if Facebook cooperates.

Ben set one of Ben's replies as an official response to "Twitter fetching error" in Socialthing

Ben replied on March 27, 2008 05:38 to the problem "Twitter fetching error" in Socialthing:

Brilliant. This was a totally different bug. This one was on our end, not twitter's. You should be up and running now. Thanks for the catch.

Ben set one of Ben's replies as an official response to "How do I resend an invite?" in Socialthing

Ben replied on March 27, 2008 01:12 to the question "How do I resend an invite?" in Socialthing:

chucksense, email me the email address you invited (ben [at] socialthing {dot} com)

Ben replied on March 26, 2008 20:29 to the problem "Twitter fetching error" in Socialthing:

Bobert, what are your socialthing and twitter usernames?

Ben replied on March 22, 2008 02:15 to the problem "Socialthing doesn't seem to want to sync with Twitter for me." in Socialthing:

What's the error message, zzap? and also, what's your socialthing and twitter usernames?

Ben set one of Ben's replies as an official response to "Adding services to My Service should open in new tab." in Socialthing

Ben replied on March 21, 2008 21:47 to the idea "Adding services to My Service should open in new tab." in Socialthing:

When you add Facebook, it asks you for your password only to log in to your facebook account, not to give socialthing your password. You then add the application just as you would if you were inside Facebook itself.

As for the address bar displaying or not, we had it displayed by default at first, but it just looked silly. We wanted it to look a little more streamlined and for the ones we're using that method with now (flickr, facebook, vimeo), you don't have to scroll the page around at all to get at the login fields.

If you're really suspicious of us trying to phish your password, you can always right-click inside the popup window and select "Page Info" and see the true url of the page. I hope this helps to settle your concerns.

Ben set one of Ben's replies as an official response to "Socialthing! does not need the ability to delete Flickr photos." in Socialthing

Ben replied on March 21, 2008 21:29 to the question "Socialthing! does not need the ability to delete Flickr photos." in Socialthing:

Abraham, this is not true. "Delete" is the only permission that allows us to upload photos. Part of our vision is allowing the user to be able to update your status (twitter, facebook, pownce, jaiku), upload photos (flickr, facebook, myspace, zoomr, etc.), post to multiple blogs (blogger, wordpress, livejournal, etc.) all from one interface.

Coming up, you'll be able to "downgrade" the access you give to your account, while sacrificing these extra features (which, given the lower permissions, we are unable to provide).

To put your mind at ease, we have no interest in actually deleting your photos on Flickr. That's merely the term they've provided for that level of permission. "Write" permission only allows the third-party application to edit/write/delete photo metadata, not the photos themselves.

If the option existed for us to ask permission to only upload photos and edit metadata, we would be ecstatic. As that option doesn't exist yet, we have to settle for the intimidating "Delete" option.

Ben set one of Ben's replies as an official response to "Posting...to what?" in Socialthing

Ben replied on March 21, 2008 19:29 to the question "Posting...to what?" in Socialthing:

Ok, so we haven't currently accounted for the situation where the user doesn't have an account (or simply haven't integrated it into socialthing) on Twitter or Pownce. We will be disabling the Post tab if you don't have these.

The "All" button simply allows you to post to all of your status updating accounts at once.

We will be adding Facebook and Jaiku to the list in case you don't have Twitter or Pownce.