New version of Keenko - integration with VKontakte, support for Firefox4

Dear Habravchane,
For the New Year 2010, we announced an exit to the closed access of the social service Keenko .

During this time, albeit with a slight delay, went into the closed access. First, we want to thank all the Habr users who participated in the closed testing. Your comments and feedback helped us a lot and many were very valuable.

Briefly about our project - Keenko is a service that allows users to:

1. To see which of their friends on social networks VKontakte, Facebook and Twitter is now online and on which sites
2. Communicate with your friends, without leaving the page you are viewing, through private messages and soon there will be group discussions
3. See which of the users of VKontakte, Facebook and Twitter are now on the same site with you
4. View profiles of your "neighbors" on the site on social networks and chat with them without leaving the page you are viewing.

The service is implemented as an add-on to the browser and integrated with Twitter, Facebook and VKontakte. At the moment, the addon is designed only for Firefox, and in the future we plan to develop versions for IE and Chrome, as well as integrate with Google account and LiveJournal.
In July 2010, testing of FF4 began. We became one of the first add-ons for FF, supporting version 4. This post is about the features of the development of add-ons for Firefox4, which we encountered, as well as about what we have done and are going to do in the near future.

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First, about the new FF4

Despite the fact that the changes to Firefox 4 did not greatly affect the developers of plug-ins - many developers are not in a hurry to update their add-ons to be compatible with version 4. The choice of users is not great, but in vain. A large number of users are already actively using FF4 and install new add-ons that are compatible with this version. Keenko is already fully compatible.

We had to upgrade very little. Just optimize the customized add-on removal window, make it compatible with the new extension manager and fix the sounds, slightly improving the file handling mechanism, since In the FF4 version, the add-on folder policy has changed. However, all these changes and one hundred percent compatibility with FF4 had no effect on the speed of consideration of our application on the official FF addon site, and we have 3 weeks on the moderation waiting list.

Separate attention deserves the support of WebSockets, which will allow us to optimize the current API and subsequently get away from the classic HTTP request / response.

News from the developers Keenko

During the closed beta test, the main innovation in Keenko is integration with VKontakte. All features of the service are now available for VK users. Unfortunately, the VKontakte API does not allow such proper integration as Facebook and users are currently forced to log in to VKontakte again every day in order to use Keenko. Problems could be solved by access to the advanced VKontakte API, which is available upon request. On our requests - complete silence, no response. If someone knows how to get an answer and to whom you can contact - please write in a personal or in the comments to the post.

Many of our users waited and asked about group discussions. We announced this opportunity, but so far we have not implemented it - we encountered some difficulties in developing interfaces. This opportunity will be realized within a month and our users will be able to gather several friends in one discussion and chat with them (analog - group chat in Skype or wave in Google Wave). The same can be done with co-serfers - users who find themselves on the same site at the same time.
In May , a post about our project from Mike Butcher was published on EU.TechCrunch.com. The idea of ​​service interested him. Unfortunately, this did not give that traffic to the English-speaking audience that we expected for a closed beta test. But it was still nice.

Our plans

Keenko will be released in the open within a month. We hope that the issue of access to the advanced functions of the Vkontakte API will be resolved. Thus, in addition to the new interface and integration with VKontakte, our users will also see new opportunities to create and participate in group discussions (similar to chat for those who happened to be on the same site and page, managing similar to Google Wave).

And in the end, we invite Habr users to participate in closed beta testing and express their opinion on the project's capabilities. Users who participated in the closed beta test - we will be grateful if you write your feedback and thoughts in the comments.

If someone has questions on the development of add-ons for FF and FF4 - write, we will be happy to share our experience.