TechCrunch recently wrote about a site called Skydeck, calling it “a very basic service that marries your address book to your cell phone bill so you can see your real social network based on who you call the most”.

Their article goes into other topics such as APIs, but I was mainly interested in the core service itself (for now - I always seem to get occupied by APIs). As it was a closed beta, I had to sign up and wait for an invite code. Thankfully they seem eager to get more people using it, as I had one the next day.

Once I was registered on their site and provided the details on how to access my cell phone’s online account (that data is stored in your browser and never given to Skydeck directly), the service began importing all of my wireless phone bills through a add-on I had to install in Firefox. Due to a glitch with the add-on, I was able to watch it go to each wireless bill and open it for reading and importing. While that was not their intention, it was interesting to see.

The add-on Skydeck installs is a toolbar. I was initially not happy about having another toolbar thrown in my face, but the data it provides could be potentially useful for the heavy cell phone users. I’ll never have a use for it since my cell phone tends to see more data useage, but here is a screenshot of my toolbar:

Skydeck's Firefox Addon Toolbar

After all my wireless data was loaded, I was presented with a screen listing nearly every phone call I’ve ever made with my cell phone provider. According to them, I’ve spent a total of 8,192 minutes talking on the phone. I’m sure that’s a small number compared to cell phone addicts (like my sister).

I was also presented with a really nice search feature — something you don’t get from your wireless provider. Using their advanced search, I am able to query my call logs in a very precise manner ranging from name, incoming/outgoing call, call/sms, number dialed, date range, what bill it was on, call duration, and call charge. Doesn’t sound like they missed a thing.

Another extremely useful feature is the Address Book. If you don’t have one already on your computer or at another website (such as Plaxo), this will take time to build up. Thankfully I have the Address Book that my iPhone syncs to the OS X Address Book, so I just had to export that data as a vCard and import it directly into Skydeck. Their system automatically linked my incoming/outgoing calls with data from the address book I provided them and gave me additional data such as call volume to a specific number, whether you or your contact calls more often, and who you call the most often. Now I am not a heavy user of my cell phone, so my records indicate that I tend to call family most often, followed by my close friends. Below is a screenshot of call statistics for one of my contacts:

Sample Skydeck Stats

With all of the features that Skydeck provides, I can’t see this not taking off. There are other aspects to it that I haven’t had a chance to use yet such as the social networking portion, but I’m honestly content with what they have provided me so far!

By the way: I am interested in finding some people to test out the social network portion of Skydeck with. I appear to have the ability to send out invites to friends and family, so e-mail me: skyinvites at bradbutner dot net

Today I looked at the new iPhone features built into Dashcode, Apple’s development environment that was originally created for Dashboard Widgets. Upon loading the application, I was presented with three new iPhone development options: Custom, Browser, and RSS.

Development

While Custom is going to give you a blank template to work with and Browser gives you a basic list view for you to fill in with your own content, the RSS template provides you a pre-coded environment to add your RSS feed and publish to your website. Today I decided to make my own iPhone version of this website.

Just like creating a Dashboard widget, you have the ability to change fonts, colors, image, and much more. Using the predefined template, I modifed the colors and background to match the look and feel of the full site you’re probably viewing this on right now. Having only used Dashcode once before to create a Podcast widget for OS X, I found no issues creating a mobile website for the iPhone. All the menus and toolbars are the same, though the library of items you can add to your mobile site are different (for good reason, of course).

As you develop your iPhone mobile RSS page, you can test it inside of the Aspen Simulator — an iPhone running on your computer (I mentioned this in the last entry). Each time I made a major change to the operation of the mobile page, I would click on the Run button, view it inside the Simulator, and operate it just like it’s on my mobile phone.

Deployment

Once I was satisfied with my changes, I went to the file menu inside Dashcode and clicked on the Deploy option. I then chose to save it to my desktop where I would be able to take it and upload it to my website.

After upload it to the labs.blackice912.net site, I decided to launch it on my actual iPhone to see the results. It turns out the results were pretty bad. No news loaded at all. I then tested it inside the Simulator and got the same results. Why was it working on my computer but not once I published it to the internet?

Well after activating the debug mode inside of Mobile Safari, I found out why. As I should have remembered, you cannot have JavaScript on one site grab data from another site. It is cross site scripting and can be considered dangerous. Realizing this, I moved the code over to blackice912.net and launched it with success.

So are there ways to use a RSS feed that is hosted on another site and use it? With the addition of PHP, yes you could do this and not run into that issue.

Conclusion

Apple has really done a lot of things right with this new SDK. While I still need to do some more investigation into the native application side of it, I am impressed with what I have seen today. You can really create a powerful web application with the SDK today and an even better one once the 2.0 firmware hits phones in June.

If you’re interested in seeing the mobile site I created, visit blackice912.net/mobile on your iPhone/iTouch or in Safari. It will not load properly in any other browser!

Today, after much work to convert my code that relied on Neowin’s backbone to help control the system, I have added my system which ties into Windows Live Custom Domains (see: Windows Live Custom Domains Is Cool) and allows you to create a custom e-mail account that is powered by Windows Live Mail.

This registration application gives you the chance to see how you can integrate Windows Live Mail into your site by giving your visitors an e-mail address that has some relation to your domain. At Neowin we provide a variety of domain name choices for members and some exclusive ones for subscribers. All of our e-mail domains have the Neowin name in them and provide recognition of our site to the users who exchange messages with these e-mail address.

If you don’t want to invest resources into running a full e-mail server but want to offer extra site service, Custom Domains is the way to go.

Feel free to give the Live Mail registration a try at the labs site: Live Mail @ blackice912 labs

I am a big fan of Windows Live Custom Domains (WLCD). Microsoft’s custom service is basically a way for you to offer members of your website a custom e-mail address that identifies them as users of your website. It can also be setup so only you can hog it all to yourself and share with nobody, but what’s the fun in that?

WLCD allows for three methods of e-mail address registration: Open, Manual, and SOAP.

With Open registration you can create a link on your site to a form hosted by Microsoft that walks the user through the creation of an e-mail account.

With Manual registration your domain is locked down. This means that nobody can create any e-mail addresses except for you inside of the admin panel. There is no real advantage to this unless you only plan to setup a few e-mail accounts.

With the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), you have the power at your fingertips. By locking your domain name down to prevent open registration, you can have your users sign up through your SOAP-based registration page. This method gives you a great deal of power on who you want to give registration access to and what domain names you want to offer them.

Above: Neowin's WLCD registration page using SOAP as the backend

Since we are communicating with Microsoft’s service using the XML commands they have designed, we can build a complete e-mail management system around that tool. Over at Neowin I designed the system so you have to be a registered member of the site in order to have access to a Neowin e-mail account. Also, depending on your membership level, there are various domain names to pick from.

Once a user fills out the form and submits it, our code connects to the Microsoft servers and pushes the XML request for account creation. If the server replies that the account has been created, we inform the user and instruct them on how to proceed next. In the code I wrote for Neowin there is also a local database where we keep track of the e-mail accounts created, as we are limiting one account per user. If a user were to try and register again, they would be blocked.

So, what’s a good way to do this in PHP? For Neowin I am using NuSOAP. It is a script that helps you to build your XML queries and process the returned ones. Also by looking at the website it looks like the project is dead based on the last updated news entry, but the download page shows it was last updated in November. Do you need NuSOAP? No, as it is completely possible to perform all the XML processing yourself. In a few cases I actually had to write custom XML as NuSOAP wasn’t sending the data correctly.

So if you’re in the market for a service to provide to your users, check out Windows Live Custom Domains.

Alternatives

So what if you are not a fan of the Windows Live services and want to go for an alternative, such as Gmail? Because while WLCD is free, the Gmail counterpart is going to cost you $50/year per e-mail account (unless you fall under the Educational rules). Why Google decided to charge for their API is beyond reason, but it puts access out of reach for the average website administrator/developer.

So I was going over my statistics on a few websites I run, and ran into some interesting information:

Above: January 2008 Stats for IPFOO.COM

Those numbers are quite impressive for a website that is designed to show you your IP Address. I was pretty stoked about it and was thinking about what I can do to improve the site, until I got down to the detailed statistics:

Above: Darn, it's all XML!

So nearly all of my traffic is being directed to my XML output page that is used in a popular Firefox extension. While the traffic is still pretty impressive, there really isn’t anyway I can tap into the potential behind it.

However, I would like to thank the ~1500 hits a month that are visiting the actual website and using it. Those visitors just got an improved layout with additional data and features.

So if you have a minute, check out IPFOO.COM: The Mr. T inspired IP Address website!