I pushed a couple of notable updates last week in between prepping for launching some upcoming conferences, so I’m going to talk about the decision behind them a little.

Private Messaging

One of the things that has always bugged me about CrowdVine’s UI was the messaging component. Here’s an example of how it used to look:

You can see what we were originally going for here- you have the ability to email some or all of your mutual contacts here. But, that’s not what people have come to expect from a social networking application. The normal use case is messaging just one person:

And that’s exactly what we have here. When you go to a mutual contact’s profile, you’ll see a private message icon.

The things I wanted to avoid doing here were twofold: a) avoid creating yet another inbox for people to have to check and b) doing much work. So, when you send someone a message, they’ll receive an email with the body of it, but your email address will not be revealed. They can respond using a url in the message. If either of you ever want to reveal your email address, you can do it yourselves.

Friend Deletion

This has been a long time coming to CrowdVine’s code, but, when you go to your contact list page, you’ll see a tiny trash can underneath your friends’ photos. If you don’t love them anymore (or if you want to do something more useful like take someone off your “want to meet” list at a conference), just click that and confirm to delete them.

Oh, we’re also on Rails 2.0.2 now, after a very painless upgrade from a recent Edge Rails revision.

A while back, Tony wrote up a post on what we were doing to protect ourselves from XSS attacks. Today, I’m releasing that same basic chunk of code as a Rails plugin.

The gist of it is, we basically run everything in the params hash through Rick Olson’s excellent white_list plugin.

That’s it. Overkill? Possibly. However, it’s been working fantastic for us. And now, it can work for you.

Because XSS attacks are horrible, horrible thing and you never want to have to deal with it. Just ask Tony.

Get it here.

Special thanks to Jodi Showers for the initial plugin work.