threadsy blog

Gmail’s archive feature is a unique innovation among email clients. Archiving a message is superior to deleting if you want to clear it out of your Inbox but think you might want to reference it in the future. “Zero-Inboxers” and other Clean-Inboxers using Gmail tend to love this feature.

Archive anything in threadsy
We’re taking Gmail’s archive idea to the next level. Now you can archive any of your threadsy Inbound messages from any service!

When you click the quick archive or archive button for a message, threadsy moves it out of your Inbound and into your threadsy archived folder.

Note that for all services except Gmail, the message is only moved in threadsy. For Gmail, the message is also moved out of your Gmail Inbox.

We just introduced our first “secret feature” and we’re finding it too difficult to keep it a secret anymore. So here’s out with it. We’re spilling the beans!

A while back you may recall us floating the idea of adding a way to Abhor Facebook posts that show up in your News Feed. The idea had a huge response and started a lot of conversation. We read through hundreds of comments and distilled a few takeaways:

• Abhor was too strong a word for most people; Dislike was greatly preferred
• Most people liked the idea; a minority of people objected to the negativity of Disliking something

Announcing Love & Dislike

From this we decided to add 2 emotions instead of one: Love & Dislike. Here’s how it works:

In threadsy, do something to unlock the secret features. See a hint here: http://twitter.com/easteregghints

Once unlocked you’ll see 2 new actions below each Facebook post in your Unbound stream:

To Love a post, click the heart. This will add the comment “I ♥ this! (via threadsy)” on this Facebook post with a link to an explanation page.

To Dislike a post, click the thumbs down. This adds the comment “Disliked (via threadsy)” to the Facebook post with a link to an explanation page.

We’re considering adding more emotions in the future (even Abhor if enough people want it). Please let us know what emotions you’d like to see in this feedback topic.

We just released a batch of changes to improve the email experience in threadsy.

Better email action buttons
Based on your feedback, we’ve revised the email action buttons to make them easier to find. Now when you open an email message, you’ll see the action buttons at both the top and bottom of the message. For now, you’ll only see the ‘Archive’ action for Gmail messages. ‘Print’ and ‘Favorite’ are tucked out of the way in a more dropdown since you probably won’t use them as much.

Move messages to your email folders
Now you can move messages out of your Inbound and into any custom email folders you’ve created on the source services; Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, and MobileMe are supported. Note that we’re using the term ‘folders’ here also for Gmail’s ‘labels’. This is our first step in supporting custom email folders in threadsy, expect deeper support soon.

This past Friday night the entire threadsy crew attended the annual Crunchies awards in San Francisco. We were nominated in the Best Design category and went up against some very stiff competition.

Although we didn’t win (this year), we had a blast. See our video highlights below, featuring a geek a capella group singing about robots.txt files and @alexwolfe risking it all in roulette.

Our latest release includes 3 important updates to the threadsy experience.

Facebook perma-connect
The top reported issue in our feedback forum has been Facebook disconnecting from threadsy at random times. We put some fixes in place a while ago, but they failed to resolve the issue all of the time. So we went back to the drawing board and completely overhauled things.

The new solution released today takes advantage of Facebook Connect’s ability to allow constant authorization. Now the connection to Facebook should be stable and permanent. It won’t disconnect randomly and as a huge bonus you’ll only need to login to Facebook once forever, not once every threadsy session.

You’ll see a new Facebook pop-up the next time you login to threadsy requesting constant authorization. Just click ‘Allow’ and you’ll be up and running.

Twitter saved searches
In our last release, we changed the Unbound navigation to make room for some new features. The first of these is full support for Twitter saved searches. Now you can easily access any of your saved searches (including from multiple Twitter accounts if you have them) by clicking the ’search’ option in the unbound navigation.

All of your saved searches are shown in a dropdown list, grouped by Twitter account. You can delete a saved search from this list by clicking the ‘x’ to the right of the item.

Just click an item to run a real-time search. If you want to click another saved search, click in the search box again to see the list of saved searches.

You can also save any search by clicking the ’save’ link in the search box after you run a search. If you have multiple twitter accounts, you must select which account you want to save it to first.

Souped-up Facebook/Twitter posting
We’ve revamped the Unbound posting experience in a few important ways.

Out of the way
Now the Unbound post box is minimized by default to let you see more updates on the screen. When you click the box, it expands to full size.

Easier posting… with more power
We’ve made selecting which accounts to post to easier by allowing you to toggle each account on or off. Now each account is represented by the service icon (Facebook or Twitter) and the associated profile pic. With this revised experience, you can post to Facebook and multiple twitter accounts all at the same time… if you really want to get the word out.

Coolest auto link shortening ever!
We’re not kidding, this is the best URL shortener integration in the history of URL shortener integrations. Astute threadsy users will notice we’ve removed the ‘add link’ link in the top Unbound compose box. Now we convert links to short URLs automatically. Here’s how it works:

• If you paste a URL into the post box, it automatically converts into a bit.ly short URL.
• If you type a URL in the post box, after you hit the spacebar it will convert into a short URL.
• If you don’t want a short URL, click the ‘x’ to show the original link.

Just in time for the holidays: now you can search twitter from within threadsy!

We’ve revised the Unbound column navigation to include twitter search and set things up for some new features we’re working on now. Unbound now has 3 sections:

Everyone:
Shows your Facebook News Feed and Twitter stream. You can see all accounts together (‘all’) or filter to only Facebook or a single Twitter account. Look for an improved tweet/Facebook update compose box soon.

Profile:
Shows the last person profile you viewed either by opening an Inbound message or clicking on a profile pic in threadsy. Look for other features in this space soon.

Search:
Right now this is a twitter-only search. Saved searches and other enhancements are in the works.

Thanks for your help in ‘09!
threadsy’s come a long way since our private beta launch at Techcrunch50 in September. Thanks to the over 1100 people who’ve participated in our feedback forum. We’ve been listening to what you’re saying… and acting on it. Out of the over 800 topics opened, we’ve completed around 250 so far.

Going into the new year, we’ll continue using the forum as a key tool in figuring out what to work on next. If there’s something you really want in threadsy, either create a topic for it or vote for an existing topic. Topics that rise to the top really get our attention and we’re always discussing them.

Have a great holiday and please continue to give us the gift of feedback.

Check yourself out! Click your own profile pic in the upper-right hand corner to view your own threadsy person profile.

We just pushed a lot of new code live… some highlights:

• support for Apple MobileMe (me.com/mac.com email addresses)
• support for Google’s just released Chrome 4 beta for the Mac
• a cleaner, less noisy design for small message view (it’s now @alexwolfe’s view of choice)
• a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff to improve performance and stability (including faster email message close speed)
• robust batch of bug fixes (we’ll update our feedback forum with specifics)

Thanks for your feedback
Thanks to the nearly 1,000 people who filled out our survey last week. It’s a huge help to hear how you feel about threadsy so far. We’ll read through everything and use your feedback to help figure out our next steps.

Teaser: what’s in the pipe
Some stuff we’re planning on releasing next. Subject to change!

• Improved Facebook connection stability with a persistent, one-time log in
• Twitter search and saved searches
• Email folder/label support

We just released an important update to threadsy which improves stability, performance, and usability.

Bug fixes
A long list. Many of them you reported in our feedback forum on GetSatisfaction, thanks for your help. We’ll update all of the related forum topics to let you know which issues we’ve fixed. Of note is significant improvement with the Facebook disconnecting threadsy issue, the top reported bug. Now if Facebook ever drops the threadsy connection, threadsy will try to automatically reconnect. In our testing we’ve seen this solves the issue most of the time. If it doesn’t auto reconnect, click this button at the top right to reconnect:

Speedier
We added some significant performance improvements to initial loading, opening email messages, and replying. We plan to continue improving performance going forward; we’re already working on our next batch of performance tweaks.

UI improvements
Based on some of your suggestions we rolled out a few changes:

• When you open an email message, the action icons are now always conveniently visible at the top.

• After you quick reply to an email or @mention to a tweet, the original message is now marked as read.
• When composing a new email message, your accounts in the ‘From’ dropdown now show the nickname of the account, not the username of the account. To change an account nickname, go to ’settings’ and click ‘rename’ for the account you want to rename.
• Changes to the multi-action buttons in the top navigation: there’s now one button for both mark read and mark unread. The button changes depending on the status of the checked messages. We’ve also dimmed some action buttons when there are no checkboxes selected.

Please take our survey!
We need your feedback. Please help us by filling out our survey. Thanks for your help!

Today we finally added an easy way for existing threadsy users to invite other people to threadsy.

You’ll now see an ‘invite friends’ link next to the Facebook post/tweet compose box at the top of the Unbound column. Just click the link and an invite code will pop into your compose box. From there, you can edit your message before posting to Facebook, Twitter, or both at the same time.

If you choose to invite people, thanks for spreading the word! If you’re not ready yet, please let us know what’s missing via our feedback forum so we can improve.

threadsy aims to pull all of your online communications together into a simpler, more integrated experience. In line with this vision, we’re excited to announce integration with Meebo’s “Meebo Bar”. An improved chat experience and broad support for all major IM services have been some of the top requests we’ve had in our feedback forum, and we think the Meebo Bar is a big step forward.

The Meebo Bar lets threadsy users access all major chat services while using threadsy including:

• AIM
• Yahoo Messenger
• Facebook Chat
• MSN Messenger
• Myspace IM
• Google Talk
• and many others

The Meebo Bar now occupies the footer of the main threadsy messages view. It features visual and audial notifications whenever you receive new chat messages and allows multiple chat windows at the same time, features requested by several users. Each chat session will appear in a separate window over your message list.

To use the Meebo bar, you must sign up for meebo and add your chat accounts to it. Just click the bar and you’ll be prompted to sign up and add your chat accounts in the popup window. To add other types of chat accounts not listed in the popup, click the ‘pop out to meebo.com’ button and you can add them there under the ’sign on to more accounts’ link. Once you’re set up, you’ll have quick access to all your chat services in one place.

Note that since the Meebo Bar supports Google Talk, we removed the top ‘chat’ tab.

OK, time to start chatting about those huge weekend plans…