« Previous post
Next post »

January 9, 2008

Social.im: The Instant Messaging Service For Facebook Junkies

Michael Arrington

33 comments »

If you don’t mind installing one more instant messaging client on your computer, and you happen to be a heavy Facebook user, check out social.im. This isn’t yet another instant messaging application that resides on Facebook; rather, it’s a normal IM client that grabs all of your Facebook friends via the Facebook API and brings them into Social.im.

It’s only available for Windows machines now, with a Mac version promised soon. We actually know next to nothing about the company, other than Hank Barry is an investor - he sent out a Facebook message this evening announcing it. The site itself has almost no information (and, yeah, you’re sharing your Facebook credentials with them to use it).

I’ve tested it on a Windows machine, but without any friends who’ve also downloaded the client it isn’t much use. If you’re one of my Facebook friends, try installing it and I’ll see if you pop up. For now, friends are listed but now showing online. And if you aren’t a friend yet, please add me.

The client also shows other basic information about facebook - new wall posts, messages, pokes, friend requests and photos tagged with your name.

The application is also a little unstable. It crashed a few minutes after opening. But hey, testing alpha software is always a little dangerous. That’s just how I roll - on the edge.

Mogad
Loading information about Mogad…

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 12:12 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Facebook IM Client Social.im Now Available For Mac

    January 23rd, 2008 at 9:31 am

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Snarky

    January 9th, 2008 at 12:44 am

    The Alpha also ships with the PDB file — perhaps debugging alpha-ware has become social as well?

    Tip for the social.im folks: Your IP stays a little safer if the PDB file doesn’t ship to your end-users. ;-)

    (For a little background reading on PDB files, check out the obligatory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_database)

  2. Manresa

    January 9th, 2008 at 12:48 am

    Love it that you roll dangerously. Looking forward to seeing how this will develop

  3. steven loi

    January 9th, 2008 at 1:32 am

    Mike,

    This reminds me a lot like Mosoto when they first launched their product. But, they never were able to get people to add their software. They changed direction and stripped out their music portion of their project and launched at as inTune.fm. As far as social.im, I downloaded it and waiting for others to sign on as well. :) Having to download an .exe file got me a bit tense, but I bit hte bullet with your endorsement.

    Steve

  4. man ray

    January 9th, 2008 at 1:33 am

    Dude. How many Aarons do you know?

  5. Evangelist

    January 9th, 2008 at 1:35 am

    Talk about going in opposite directions. Google , Y! is trying to use their existing contact db and building sort of social aspects around it. Now with this Facebook is starting to offer IM also…. which is actually good.

  6. Evangelist

    January 9th, 2008 at 1:36 am

    Forgot to add: I wish something like this for LinkedIn when they open up their API.

    Thanks

  7. steven loi

    January 9th, 2008 at 1:47 am

    @ Evangelist:

    It’s not Facebook that is offering the IM application. It’s by third party developers that use the FB API to make this application possible.

  8. Mayer

    January 9th, 2008 at 2:12 am

    Now all we need is a Blackberry App.

  9. Techlightenment

    January 9th, 2008 at 2:33 am

    Look out for the Friendvox.com announcement, very soon. We launched our standalone application in alpha a couple of months ago (covered on TCUK here http://uk.techcrunch.com/2007/.....-facebook/).

    We have a few surprises planned!

  10. tyler

    January 9th, 2008 at 2:52 am

    want a linux version

  11. mike

    January 9th, 2008 at 3:08 am

    seems a bit buggy. should have waited until everything was ok first until releasing

  12. Christine

    January 9th, 2008 at 5:10 am

    unfortunately the IM crashed after a few seconds. The idea is cool but the first technical experience is not persuasive.

  13. Mathew Ingram

    January 9th, 2008 at 5:41 am

    Sorry Mike — installed it and tried to login and chat with you but it kept crashing. Cool idea though.

  14. Aadaam

    January 9th, 2008 at 5:49 am

    There are plenty of these.

    Most of them are built on top of Jabber/XMPP (the protocol behind, for example, Google Talk, although Jabber is much older)

    You just grab a free server implementation - there are plenty of such - modify the authentication and contact management code, and you’re done- and you can choose from a lot of clients, libraries, etc to use, rebrand or modify.

    Two examples of the many:

    http://soapbox.net/facebook.aspx

    http://www.mikehuntington.com/.....messaging/ (offline, was called muze and used air)
    https://stpeter.im/?p=1942

    Also XMPP + AIR based, similiar to muze: http://airtalkr.com/

    I suspect friendvox, mosoto, etc could be also jabber-based.

    Not so facebook, but you can use as sourcecode if you want to build such:

    http://jwchat.org (javascript client)
    http://zeank.in-berlin.de/jsjac/ (javascript library)
    http://www.igniterealtime.org/ (Easy-to-install-config-use server with a webadmin interface)
    http://ejabberd.im (large-scale open source server: can hold the 3 million users of portugal telecom)

    I’m not affiliated with any of the above organizations.

    Good luck.

  15. Joe

    January 9th, 2008 at 7:05 am

    Why use it if you can IM with friends from ALL social networks and not just Facebook?
    I use 8hands, which allows IM with friends from Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Flickr.
    I think it supports other networks as well, not sure.
    these are the ones I use :)

  16. Javy

    January 9th, 2008 at 7:22 am

    I don’t think it likes my firewall software at all… looks promising though… =)

  17. LA guy

    January 9th, 2008 at 8:12 am

    DId people forget mosoto ??

    http://www.mosoto.com ? INSTANT MESSAGING SERVICE WITH VIDEO ON THE WEB !!!

  18. etorsten

    January 9th, 2008 at 8:40 am

    Hmmm,
    it´s only for windows…
    I want a Mac-version.

  19. Yanda Erlich

    January 9th, 2008 at 10:21 am

    Hi Michael & commenters,

    I just wanted to respond to a few of the comments

    1. [@Michael] You don’t actually share your Facebook credentials with us. The login page for Social.IM is actually served up by Facebook: it’s the desktop equivalent of Facebook’s “add my app” page. We never get your Facebook username and password, only that you’ve been authenticated by Facebook.

    2. [@Michael] I’m sorry if the application crashed on you. We just launched to friends a few days ago and are still fixing bugs: you really are on the cutting edge ;-)

    3. [@Snarky] Fixed. Oops. Thanks :-)

    4. For the folks experiencing crashes…we’re fixing bugs feverishly. If you can send us the error reports when you get crashes, we greatly appreciate it and will get stuff fixed for you very fast. Thanks for being patient!

    5. [etorsten #17] It’s coming…promise

    -Yanda & Lucas-
    (www.social.im)

  20. PJ Brunet

    January 9th, 2008 at 10:43 am

    Thanks for the add!

  21. PJ Brunet

    January 9th, 2008 at 10:45 am

    Doesn’t work with Windows2000 :-(

  22. Armen Berjikly

    January 9th, 2008 at 11:26 am

    Glad to see this compelling application getting exposure. The toast notifications (e.g., a friend updates their status) are very helpful to keep an eye on my ever-increasing Facebook event flood. Nice job, guys!

  23. Neil Sheth

    January 9th, 2008 at 11:36 am

    I like the one-click bottom toolbar buttons to take me directly to the parts of facebook I use most - wall, inbox, etc. Cool app!

  24. Dan Kamins

    January 9th, 2008 at 3:42 pm

    This app is great! If you use Facebook and have lots of friends in there, it’s nice to not have to worry about managing multiple contact lists. It just shows your FB friends and who’s online and you can chat with them. Very simple, very easy, very cool. It hasn’t crashed on me yet either — seems very stable to me.

  25. Aaron

    January 9th, 2008 at 10:52 pm

    Well I didn’t expect that THIS is how I’d first see my name on Tech Crunch! :)

    You have to go to the web site link to find out which Aaron I am…

  26. Willy

    January 9th, 2008 at 11:29 pm

    Doesn’t work with Windows95 =(

  27. Rocamadour

    January 10th, 2008 at 8:28 am

    That isn´t new. Why does techcrunch publish only about their contacts? I know a plattform they have this tool seit 3 months ago. And they are a community too. But Michael Arrington won´t publish it because they have not paid him.

  28. sumit gupta

    January 10th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

    like the idea, the player. hope this catches up. I am sure meebo will copy this within a fortnight if this starts getting popular..

    none of my friends are online :( maybe I need to add Mike as my friend :)

  29. Eli

    January 10th, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    Can somebody tell me how this thing will get scale? Why would anybody download it now? There is nobody to chat with. Unless they start to interoperate with existing networks and protocols, it seems like it will be a lot like Mogad…an interesting product that has not gone anywhere.

  30. Yanda Erlich

    January 10th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

    Hi again,

    Some more responses since the last time around. :-)

    PJ [#21]: I doubt we’ll be able to suport Win2K anytime soon. Sorry :(
    Armen, Neil, Dan [#22-#24] Thank you guys! Love the support!
    Willy [#26]: Same as #21 unfortunately. Sorry.
    Rocamadour [#27]: I still haven’t met Michael and we only contacted each other _after_ the post (so that I could thank him and provide him more details on the company). I seriously doubt anyone paid Michael, and it certainly wasn’t me (I’m a starving entrepreneur still… no money for bribes)
    Sumit [#28] Thank you! Meebo is certainly on our radar. That said, I think we could do something solid together instead, given that their expertise lies in the web-based IM world and we’ve built a (we think) compelling desktop experience. Thoughts?
    Eli [#29] Ouch. People are downloading every minute and most of our users have been very supportive. It might not go anywhere (most products fail, including many of mine), but it looks like Social.IM has a pretty decent chance. As for interoperating…an XMPP/Jabber gateway is in the works. Coming shortly. Give us a chance. :-)

    -Yanda-

  31. thomas

    January 24th, 2008 at 10:41 am

    social im will not install get message contact vender make sure its a windows app (im useing xp)

  32. petar

    January 25th, 2008 at 9:53 pm

    kiss

« Previous post
Next post »