Smileys!

One of our most requested features has been to add some cool smileys/emotes to social.im, so here they are!

Upgrade to the latest version from http://social.im (or Check for Updates on your client) to get smiley feature.

Click on the grey smiley icon to see a list of possible smileys. Some are available immediately while others you'll need to be unlock by inviting friends.

We've added some cool and some pretty ridiculous emotes, so be sure to check out the whole list!

Also, you can even earn the right to upload an image of your choice as an emote. Check out http://apps.facebook.com/socialim/emotes.php for more details. Impress your friends with a custom emoticon that only you can send!

Have fun!

We're hiring!

If you're a superstar engineer (or know of one), like what we've done so far, and want to be part of social.im going forward, give us a shout at

We're a small team where everyone is highly valued. (Yes, we pay salaries. Yes, we have stock)

We're based in San Francisco, but the possibility to work remotely is open, depending on experience.

Feature roadmap

Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to give us feedback on the product. If you haven’t done so yet, we’d love to hear from you in the comments here or via feedback@social.im Bug reports should be sent to bugs@social.im

A lot of people have been asking what features are coming out and when. First off, let me premise this by saying I’m a generally unreliable individual and an inveterate liar. Now that your expectations have been set appropriately, here’s our todo list in order of priority. We hope to knock an item off the list every few days.

1. Invisible mode
2. User blocking (e.g. fine grained control over who can contact you and see when you are online)
3. Toast stacking – right now toast alert windows have a tendency to overlap if they arrive in a wave
4. Local chat logs
5. Auto-away mode – by default set your status to away when your computer is idle for a configurable amount of time
6. Group chat
7. HTTP-based firewall traversal
8. File transfer
9. Different styling options for chat dialog windows (small and/or no pictures)
10. Roster sorting / searching
11. Offline messaging
12. Native OS X Client
13. Buy everyone on earth a puppy
14. Tabbed chat windows

There are a few surprises not on this list related to deeper integration with existing gaming, messaging and social networks. If we told you, we’d have to kill you, but we think you'll be pleased when you see them.

Certain things take priority over client feature development, and will probably delay things:

• Diagnosing client crash reports
  
• Putting out fires related to scaling the server side of things
  
• Nursing hangovers

Thought Bubble: Love it or hate it?

BTW, one existing client feature we've heard a lot of feedback about is our "other party is typing indicator" mechanism (inspired by iChat) which is to show a thought bubble next to the other person's mug in the chat dialog window. We've gotten mixed reviews on this ... especially from people who have never used iChat. What are your thoughts? What do you think is the slickest way to indicate the other party is typing or has entered text?

Now works on Mac, Linux!

Social.IM now works on Mac and Linux!

We now support XMPP (Jabber). This means you can use Social.IM to chat with all your Facebook friends on the Mac through iChat or Adium. It also works on Linux, using any XMPP-compatible client.

Click here to install our app on Facebook and get the account info you'll need to configure your client!




















[UPDATE 2007-28-01: FYI, we’re still fighting a few issues with our XMPP integration … if you don’t see your roster the first time you login try logging back out and back in again.]

Easy way to invite friends!

Hi everyone,

We just added an easy way to invite the friends you want to chat with right from the client. Just click on their names and it will open Facebook with a message, which you can customize, suggesting that they try out social.im and come chat with you.

The latest version of the client is 1.0.2493.0 as of today. Click here to grab it.

Off to the races!

I just wanted to take a moment to thank all the nice people who wrote news about us on our launch day:

• Michael Arrington at TechCrunch who broke the story this morning and was on the bleeding edge, downloading a still-buggy version (that crash is fixed by the way, thanks Mike for finding it) and getting the party started
• Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook who followed up and gave us some great feature suggestions
• Eric Eldon at VentureBeat who first covered our financing round way back when we were doing something else and has a very detailed analysis of our product. I promise the Mac version is coming soon, Eric
• And last but definitely not least Megan McCarthy at Wired who wrote an amazingly accurate feature description story of our product.
  

Thank you all very very much!

Readers: if any of you wrote about us or know about other people who have, please let me know...

In other news...social.im is spreading:

• Join our Facebook group
• Fan our Facebook page
• And most importantly install the application and tell your friends

Thanks!

New version available

If you downloaded social.im before 6 PM today, you probably wanna upgrade it ... we fixed a bunch of bugs today.  There is an auto-update option under social.im's help menu.

Launched

Alpha launched yesterday ... seems word travels fast in the Valley these days ... Mr. Arrington over at TechCrunch has already crashed [literally] the party.

Stay tuned for more updates.