Lingr Blog

We've got new offspring!

Today we've launched our newest product, Rejaw. Check out the details over at the Rejaw blog.

Release Notes: Goodies for Fans

Greetings Lingrers,

Here's the new stuff on Lingr.

Email notification for private message

If you use Lingr Radar or other equivalents, now you can receive email notification when someone sends a private message to your Radar, without the need to disclose your email address.

If you don't want the email notification, unsubscribing is easy - Just go to your account, and turn off the emailing option at the bottom.

For API developers: "A radar equivalent" means that client_type is set to "automaton" and the permission for API key is set as "observe-only".

Google Video supported

Finally. Recently I had a chance to realize that Google Video was a good fit to share my private movies in my family room.

For those who don't know about Google Video, it allows you to set an "Unlisted" option to a movie, which makes the movie publicly accessible, but only to the people who know the movie URL. That's exactly the same way as we do in unlisted chat rooms. I love it!

To post a movie in your chat room, you just paste the movie URL like http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8618166999532839788, and you see the movie as follows.

Enjoy posting movies using Google Video!

System message suppression - now optional

In the past release, we made a decision to suppress system messages such as "John has joined" or "John has left". On the one hand it's been going well, but on the other some of you didn't seem to like it.

That response drove us to reconsider, and this time we've changed it to an option per room.

Note that all join/leave messages are recorded at the backend, whichever option you take. All you do is to toggle whether you want to show them or not. So you can safely try out and switch between them, at any time.

Better timestamps

Now you would see message timestamps appear less frequently, having the date for ones not spoken today.

Other changes and fixes

• Private message from an observer now recognizes if the observer is signed-in
• Fixed sudden signed-in status invalidation
• Fixed duplicated "connection: close" header for API

We hope you like it!

- Kenn

Towards an even more open API

Since we first released the Lingr API, by far the most frequent request that we've had was to allow embedding a chatroom in a web page.  Some of our developers have actually created such things, but they all suffered from one drawback- because our API was fully REST compliant, it wasn't possible to do many interesting things purely from Javascript.  The reason for this is that the REST convention is that any operation that changes state on the server should be an HTTP POST operation.  That makes perfect sense, however, it kills any possibility of a purely Javascript/JSON implementation, because, while Javascript can certainly perform POST operations, it cannot do so asynchronously, nor can it retrieve the results of a POST (well, while this isn't technically true, it is practically true).  The solution that most developers have taken is to proxy the POST calls through their own servers.  This works fine, but, it seems like an unnecessary complication.

We were faced with a conundrum- on the one hand, we want to be REST compliant, because we're engineers and every engineer loves a nice, cut-and-dry specification.  On the other hand, we want to allow pure Javascript clients to access our full API, because, as we've learned, the most interested Lingr API clients don't originate from the lingr.com domain :-)

So today, I'm happy to announce that we've opened up all of our API methods to HTTP GET operations.  Even though the documentation for a particular method may still state that POST is required, in fact, on the backend, we've disabled HTTP method checking for API calls.

In addition, we've published lingr.js, a full read-only Lingr chatroom client in Javascript.  While it is missing some obvious functionality (the ability to say something, for example), it is a great starting point to embedding a chatroom in your web pages.  You can find documentation on lingr.js over at the Lingr Developer Wiki.  We'll continue to add new functionality to lingr.js- this is just the beginning.

If you use lingr.js, please let us know, and add your creation to the Showcase.  We're eager to see how people take this ball and run with it.

- Danny

Update: we have added say capability to lingr.js :-)

No more system messages in chatrooms

We have deployed a new release that suppresses system messages in the chatroom.  That means no more messages like "john has joined the conversation", "john is now known as john-boy", etc.- we reserve all the chatroom space for user messages now.

Note that system messages will still appear in the archives- we think that they are necessary to understand the context of conversations that occurred in the past.

Let us know what you think about this new feature by sending us feedback.

- Danny

New Archive Search API

To complement our recent additon of full archive search capability, we have added a new API method to access this search functionality.  See the Lingr Developer Wiki for full details.

Enjoy!

- Danny

At long last, full archive search

Lingr is what you make it: The entire site is full of nothing but your content. Your rooms, your messages, your pictures, your tags, etc. We’ve created the space, and you’ve filled it.

Till now, however, you’ve only had two choices for accessing that data: Read through the archives, day by day, or search each room’s archives using Google. Both methods work, but neither is ideal.

Now you can search the Lingr archives directly. And man is there a lot to search…

All public room archives are searchable at www.lingr.com/search/archives. The results are sorted for you by their relevancy and their recency. We’ve grouped them by room, and by day, so that you can scan through the list faster. You can drill down into each room, and each day within each room, assuming there enough relevant results.

And you can now search every room from within that room’s archives. So if you’re in the archives of a private or password-protected room, you’ll see one of our standard search forms in the sidebar on the right side. Put your query in there and click Search archives. (Of course, you can only search the archives of private and password-protected rooms if you already have access to them. They’re not public.)

Since there’s so much data in the Lingr archives, we’ve got a lot more work to do on optimizing our search algorithms and on how we present the search results. So, as always, please send us your feedback.

And enjoy your searching!

– Chris

Lingr Release: Private messaging! Yay!

We’re happy to announce the release of a long-awaited feature: Private messaging.

How to talk privately?

First, click a nickname in the chatters list.

Then you’ll get a popup window for private messaging, as well as the profile of the person you’re talking to.

The messages sent from here are kept private — only you and the recipient will see them.

That’s it!

Note that those private messages aren’t saved, so they’ll disappear when you hit the reload button in your browser.

Also, you can send private messages even when you’re an observer. That means you don’t need to join the conversation if you’d just like to send a quick note to a someone in the room.

Et cetera

As always, we have many other enhancements! The following are some of the more significant changes that we’ve made in this release:

• Password protected rooms are no longer listed in the hot rooms list.
• Once you’ve entered the password for a room while you’re signed-in, your authenticated status will be saved in your account and you won’t be asked for the room password again.
• The archives are now compressed by the server, which should greatly improve their download speed.
• The help menu is now a pull-down, so you have a direct access to feedback from chatrooms, as some of you have requested.

We’ve been psyched about this new release internally for the past couple weeks, and are really happy to share it with all of you! We hope you love what you see!

Don’t forget to tell us what you think!

– Kenn

New Archives API

In response to the requests of many developers, we've added a new API method to access room archives- see the Lingr Developer Wiki for full details.

We continue our pursuit of completely open access to the data that you generate inside Lingr- this new API method is just one of many steps toward that goal.

- Danny

New APIs

By popular demand, we have added API methods for creating a room, changing an existing room's settings, and deleting a room.  You can get the full details on the Lingr Developer Wiki.

Enjoy!

- Danny

Finally- timezone support!

Since we launched Lingr, many of you have asked for timezone support in the rooms.  Until now, all message timestamps have been in US Pacific time- great if you live in California, but not much use if you're in Germany. 

Well, we're pleased to announce that room owners can now designate a timezone for their rooms, so that message timestamps appear in that timezone. 

Taking advantage of this new feature is simple- just go to the settings page for one of your rooms, and you'll find a new timezone setting.  Choose the timezone that best represents your room's community, and you're set!

Visitors to a room (and the room archives as well) see the room timezone on the sidebar, so everyone knows how to interpret the timestamps within that room.

We're excited to deploy this new feature as it has been one of the most requested feature enhancements- enjoy!

- Danny