Faster by leaps and bounds

Once you login, you’ll notice right away that we cut the loading wait down big time; it takes just 1/5th the time it used to.

We also improved performance in most areas of threadsy, such as the address-autocomplete, sending messages, composing messages, switching to folders, and filtering to accounts. You’ll find the whole threadsy experience snappier.

To make threadsy even faster, we recommend upgrading your browser to the latest version. Recent versions have improved Javascript speed greatly, and threadsy uses a breathtaking amount of Javascript. For example, the latest Firefox 3.6 boosted Javascript performance by 70% from 3.0 and other browsers are even faster. As these performance gains continue, threadsy will benefit directly.

What’s on tap? Drafts.

One thing you’ll notice right away is a new drafts tab. For you procrastinaters out there, we’ve added the ability to save drafts of email messages. You can save a message as a draft by clicking the save draft button while you’re composing a new email message. To view all of your current drafts, click the drafts tab at the top. Note that only drafts you save while using threadsy will be shown in the threadsy drafts folder.

And you’ve got mail folders

Since we launched our private beta, we’ve heard a chorus of requests to support all of your email folders in threadsy. We previously introduced the ability to move email messages to any of your folders. We’ve finally completed the other major piece of the puzzle: now you can read your messages from any of your email folders directly in threadsy! The redesigned top navigation (see below) lets you filter to any folder from any email account.

A few additional notes on our folder support:

• We import Gmail labels and refer to them as folders in threadsy. If a Gmail message has more than one label, we’ll show it in multiple folders on threadsy.
• Hotmail folders are not supported. Wish we could but POP3 doesn’t support it!
• For now you need to create, rename, and delete folders in your source service.
• See our post on archiving non-gmail messages for more details on how that works.
• We haven’t been able to fully test all of your IMAP accounts, so there may be some unknown issues. If you find issues please let us know.

Simplified navigation

We’ve completely overhauled the top navigation experience for both Inbound and Unbound messages. Based on usability testing, usage, your feedback, and the need to accommodate more features, we went back to the drawing board and designed a new navigation UI with simplicity in mind.

We reduced the overall number of buttons and links shown from 28 to 20 and reduced the visual weight while adding some important new features. We kept all of the power, added more, and transformed it from heavy & complex to light & simple. Here’s a walkthrough of what’s new:

Inbound: on the Inbound side you’ll see 4 tabs:

• inbound: all of your Inbound. The number indicates the total number of unread messages in your Inbound across all of your accounts. Click the Inbound tab again while it’s selected to manually check for new messages. Note that threadsy automatically checks for new messages frequently on a timer when you’re logged in, so a manual refresh isn’t necessary unless you want to check immediately.
• drafts: your threadsy drafts, as discussed above
• sent: your sent messages from all accounts
• more: hover over the more tab and you’ll see a dropdown menu with these options:

• trash: your trash messages from all accounts
• archived: your archived messages from all accounts
• unread: all unread messages in your Inbound
• starred: all starred messages in your Inbound
• individual accounts: click the account name to see just the Inbox for that account.

To filter the account further or to see just messages from a specific folder in the account, hover over the right arrow to see these additional options:

Unbound: on the Unbound side, we’ve tightened up the navigation UI and made it consistent with the new Inbound navigation:

New retweet support

On the Twitter side, we’ve added support for the support for new retweet standard. Click the retweet action on Unbound or Inbound tweets. When a tweet has been retweeted by you or someone you follow, it will show a retweet icon next to it and you’ll see the original tweeter’s photo large and the retweeter’s photo smaller.

Last but not least: improved reliability

Since our last update we’ve nipped a bushel of bugs and will be updating our support forum with the details. If you stumble on anything not quite right, please report it and we’ll investigate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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

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!

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.