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Impeccable TimingSeptember 26

The Soocial web servers are up and running again. There was some trouble at the data center in New York around 12:30 am GMT which affected our service as well.

No data has been lost, your contacts are safe.

We’ve been working really hard the last couple of hours to get our servers back up. Our servers are in a private network, an extra feature that has security and speed benefits, and the gateway to this network was broken which required some rewiring of the machines in the network. While we’re not happy with the downtime we are relieved that the service is up and running again. We’re taking some time to evaluate what has happened and what we can do to avoid such problems in the future.

It seems like Murphy has been proven right once again as this downtime came at the worst possible moment. This afternoon Stefan will be on stage with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, at Picnic’ 08. Soocial will be showing the audience what it’s like for a startup to use Amazon Web Services and after that we’ll have a short Q&A session with Werner about why we’re not fully hosted on Amazon’s web services platform and what it would take for us to do so.

Same feet, new shoesAugust 28

OK, it’s not really new shoes, more like new feet – but since Nike and Soocial partnered for the first edition of the “Nike Web 2.0 Series” we thought that would get your interest. More info on the “Nike Web 2.0 Series” to come!

Lots of improvements

Soocial’s been working hard and we’ve just deployed a new version! This post will give you a quick overview of what’s changed. Behind the scenes a lot has changed, but also we’ve tweaked and improved the interface of the contact editor.

• Contact editor: New way of editing contacts
• GMail sync engine: Split syncing into fast and slow sync
• Highrise sync engine: Split syncing into fast and slow sync
• Sync server: fewer borked syncs and fewer faulty added contacts
• Deduping: more accurate duplication detection
• General: better scaling, many many bug fixes

Manual sync button

By popular demand we’ve added a manual sync button. You can now trigger syncs manually to GMail and Highrise from our web app. Our philosophy is that you shouldn’t have to use this button to sync. Syncing should be done behind the scenes with minimal interaction from the user. However i

Sooviet partyAugust 25

On Saturday we participated as the Soocialist Alliance and the Soocialist Party in a fun Petanque tournament here in Amsterdam. Unfortunately our involvement wasn’t that successful. In an act of “pure coincedence”, one of our blog-readers created a version of our homepage with a similar theme.

That’s pretty freakin’ awesome!

Trading Hasselhoff comics for an invite!August 6

We daily get tons of invite requests via email. Some of these are very cool, including ASCII dances like ()()()\/ \/ ()()() etc. But today we got a pretty cool request that I think earns the prize so far – a classic Hoff comic from Wulffmorgenthaler.com:

How could I resist? This lucky man has his invite. Anybody else have some fun stuff they’d like to share for an invite?

Soocial progress updateJuly 28

Since our last progress update a lot has happened. We are committed to being transparent in what we’re doing, thus now is a good time to give a quick progress update of what we’ve been working on and what’s coming. Even though things might seem quiet from the outside, rest assured we are working very hard on creating the best contact platform for everybody.

Read the full update

Since our last progress update a lot has happened. We are committed to being transparent in what we’re doing, thus now is a good time to give a quick progress update of what we’ve been working on and what’s coming. Even though things might seem quiet from the outside, rest assured we are working very hard on creating the best contact platform for everybody.

We’ve been working hard on a number of areas and will continue to work on these area’s until they are ready for deployment. The issues we’re working on are the following:

• GMail syncing: The first time you make any piece of software it is often exploratory – with our GMail engine that was certainly the case. We’