Moped

We're happy (and proud!) to be IFTTT's Channel Of The Week!

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:28:00 -0400

IFTTT is a service that lets you create powerful connections with one
simple statement. You just need to write a Recipe with a Trigger and
an Action, such as:

IF “I check in on Foursquare”, IF “a specific Instagram user uploads a new photo”, IF “it doesn’t rain in London”

THEN “send me a Moped message” or “send me a notification”. E.g. https://ifttt.com/recipes/65941

This way, you can get notified when your stock options reach a certain
value, when the weather is getting nice in Berlin, if Facebook pages you like are updated, etc.

You can get a Sunscreen alert, alert someone that you’ve added a new file to a public Dropbox folder, turn Moped into a stream of package tracking updates, send daily Dilbert comic strips to yourself, and so much more!

Here are some of our favourite Moped recipes: http://bit.ly/QFEZJn : )

We hope you’ll enjoy those as much as we do, and please share your new recipes with us, on Moped @mat.

Cheers !

Also: IFTTT Channel Helps Keep Moped Users in the Loop (Silicon Allee)

We Never See Your Personal Data: How Address Book Matching Works

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:42:50 -0400

Moped is a communications tool. It’s very high priority for us to make sure that you are able to reach as many of your contacts as possible even if the other party is not in moped, yet. That’s why we came up with our email feature which allows you to send out messages to email addresses and converts the incoming email replies to messages in your moped timeline.

In addition to that, we also want to make it as easy as possible to find your contacts who are already moped users. We have two important tools for this: connecting your Facebook account with moped to see which of your friends are already on board and connecting your address book with moped so that we can match people in your address book with existing moped users.

We are aware this is a delicate issue and we ourselves would not want some random Internet service to sell our and our friends’ data to some shady advertising establishments in Eastern Europe. That’s why we make sure that Moped servers never ever have access to the email addresses of your contacts (or any other personal information for that matter, not even their name)

The underlying problem here is how to find matches between the emails of moped users (known to our servers) and the emails in your address book (known to your device). There are two basic possibilities here. First: you can send us all of your address book and our servers find the matches and return back an array of your contacts who are already on moped. But we don’t want to do that because that would mean that we would have access to your address book and could spam the hell out of your contacts. The second: we send you all our user information so that your device can find the matches without giving us your private information. This doesn’t work either because you’d have access to the email address of all Moped users and could spam the hell out of them. (It would also be very impractical to download such a big data set and comb through it on your mobile device)

So, how do we solve this problem without violating anybody’s privacy and still allow everybody to find the people they already know in Moped?

Cryptography to the rescue: hashes!

A hash is a one-way transformation of a string with two important properties:

Different strings should have different hashes
There cannot be reverse transformation, meaning the original sting cannot be obtained using the hash.

Let’s say Alice signs up for moped with her email address alice@hotsnail.com and has Bob (bob@qmail.com) and Cindy (cindy@hayoo.com) in her address book. When she taps the find my friends button, the app adds a secret string (‘.our-secret-sauce’ for the sake of example) to each email and phone number in her address book and computes the SHA-1 hash of the results. So for our example Bob’s and Cindy’s emails become:

bob@qmail.com => bob@qmail.com.our-secret-sauce => f0e9f69fbf0abe945ac1ac7c385e4fe36e8fb543

cindy@hayoo.com => cindy@hayoo.com.our-secret-sauce => 088b70e1a35b60066970255abd7eb906f9ce5cf3

Additionally our clients also retrieve Alice’s own contact card and hash her other phone numbers and emails to improve the chances that her friends who join Moped later would get connected to her.

Our server saves only those hashed values and never receives any plain-text information from Alice’s address book. When Bob signs up for Moped with his email address bob@qmail.com the server generates the hash using the same ‘our-secret-sauce’ string and since the result matches with the hash value previously submitted by Alice, the server notifies both that other one is also on Moped.

As of 2012, the cost of breaking a single SHA-1 hash is estimated to be around $2.7 million by renting CPU power from cloud providers and using the most efficient algorithms. This not only makes it prohibitively expensive for us to decode to your email address but also protects our address book matching database from users who’d like to impersonate others by submitting fake hashes.

Please do say ‘Hi’ if you have further questions or suggestions. I can be reached with the username @engintepe over Moped.

Engin Kurutepe

Pro tip: clicking usernames

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 08:01:15 -0500

On our iPhone app, you can click a username and you’ll get options to view that user’s profile (which is really simple right now), reply to that message or create a new message to that user.

Try it out…

Note: Only on iPhone for now.

New, creative tools for sending photos in Moped

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:37:03 -0500

We’re building Moped to help improve the way we communicate with each other, whether it’s a long-time friend or someone you’ve just been introduced to at a conference.

Photos are a big way of how we share our experiences, feelings and just have fun together.

Today, we’re releasing tools that will help you edit, enhance and have more fun with the photos you send on Moped.

Filters (effects): Choose between 12 different, unique filters

Crop: Make the picture *any* size you want

Meme & text: Have fun by adding some text to your filters.

Draw: Get creative, show your funny side

The new apps are available today. Download now for iPhone and Android.

Sharing songs on Moped

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 05:43:00 -0500

We love music. We’ve made sharing Spotify links in Moped a first class experience. Try it out for yourself.

Send emails with rich content from Moped

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 05:36:00 -0500

Did you know you can send emails from Moped? To reach someone via email from Moped, just place “@” in front of the email address. Whoever you’re messaging will get an email from you. They can message you back by replying to your email.

e.g. @schuyler@mopedlabs.com where are we meeting later?

Pro tip: You can share venues in Moped pretty easily. Foursquare venues show up as beautiful widgets in our apps, and show up as links in Moped emails.

When clicking the venue’s name, in this case, “St. Oberholz,” a popular cafe in Berlin, you are taken to that places Foursquare page which has more information about that place.

Feature Friday: Places

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 06:00:28 -0500

Where are we meeting? Seems like we answer that question a lot via SMS or on the phone. Moped has a feature that makes “Where are we meeting?” really easy and fun to explain. See below.

Step 1: Press the Place icon (circled)

Step 2: A list of nearby places (from Foursquare) will appear.

Optional Step 2a: If you don’t see the place you want immediately, you can just type to search for something else. Note: we *only* recommend nearby places. So if you’re in New York, and trying to pull up a place in San Francisco, it won’t work.

Once you’ve found the place you want, Select it, and it’ll be inserted into the message as text.

You and the recipient(s), in this case, Adam, will see the location’s name, address and a map preview.

Clicking on the map will bring up a map. If you click on the restaurant name, you’ll be able to open the location in Foursquare for more information about that venue.

This is a really useful feature for us, and we hope you like it, too. We use it just about every day to set up meetings and coordinate meals. It’s powerful because it’s so simple.

If you like this, and think you could use this, tell someone about it. We’d love feedback if you have any. You can reach us support@mopedlabs.com or inside moped, @support.

Moped supports Places on Web, iPhone and Android. Get it now!

Android love

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 03:00:00 -0500

Our iPhone app gets a lot of the attention around here. Many of us here at Moped use iPhones, but we have always and will always have an Android app. So, this post is going to be about what we’ve been doing over on the Android side of the garage.

Languages

Our team comes from all over the world. We’re going to be translating our apps into some of the languages we speak.

As of today, the Android app is available in Spanish, Catalan and Chinese.

If your phone is set to any of those languages, then Moped will also be available in that language to you.

Photo editing tools

This one is fun. Our new photo editing tools from Aviary let you crop, filter, draw on and write on photos before you send them from Moped. Snap a new picture, or upload one from your library, then edit away. If you don’t want to spice up your pictures before sending, you can still send pictures the old fashioned way.

We hope you enjoy these new updates. If you have any issues with the app, just get in touch with us, @support on Moped or via email at support@mopedlabs.com. If you’re using our app in Spanish, Catalan or Chinese, feel free to reach out to us in those languages, too.

Download the latest Android app: Click here.

More from the garage soon,
Moped Android team

Better conversations with web app

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 11:35:13 -0500

We’ve been working hard on some changes under the hood that will improve everyone’s experience on Moped. As we’ve begun rolling out a series of updates, you’ll have noticed some changes to our web app.

First, the feed is now organized into conversations. Our mobile apps have supported this for a while, but we’re just now releasing this on the web. There’s more exciting stuff to come here here, so watch this space.

The biggest visual change is that you can now click into a conversation and reply freely without having to prepend usernames in front of every messages. This makes conversing much faster, while at the same time keeping Moped lean and clean.

You can still add new participants to the conversation, and once they’re added, they’ll be able to see that conversation’s history.

One more thing: We’re now giving users the option to either click reply or just “Enter” to send/reply. When “Enter to send” is enabled, you can line down with “Shift + Enter.”

Mobot: The Moped chat bot

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:16:00 -0500

We made ourselves an artificial pet. She’s not terribly intelligent but can still talk way better than a normal dog.

We came up with the idea while thinking about how to make testing Moped a bit easier. We normally create test accounts and login using separate private browser windows to and initiate fake conversations with our alter personalities to see how well the things we’re working on actually work. Mobot makes this a bit easier by removing the need to login on different browsers and feels a bit less schizophrenic and mostly funnier.

The Mobot-brain is based on the A.L.I.C.E bot engine, which is supposed to have won several Turing test style competitions and is hosted by Pandora Bots. They also provide a simple API, which we employ a quick Node.js hack. Our Node.js process listens for Pusher notifications from the Moped server, extracts the corresponding message, submits it to Pandora and forwards the answer from the bot back to the Moped server using our still-in-private API. As a matter of fact Mobot is the second app to use our API. (the first one of course being the IFTTT channel).

Mobot still needs a lot of training and we’re figuring it out as we go along but she definitely has a quirky, even if predictable at times, personality which gives rise to many interesting conversations as Adam shared recently.

Talking to Mobot is easy: just shoot a message to @mobot on moped.com and see how well you get along. And please do send us screenshots of any funny conversations.

Engin Kurutepe

@engintepe

Grichdroid: iOS dominates market for Christmas Cheer

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 14:33:00 -0500

Well, that settles it. Device activations notwithstanding, Apple/iOS seems to have a stronghold on good tidings. Looking at the picture above, it’s becoming a lot less of a question how the hue of android’s green was chosen.

We set a little bell to ring each time a moped was sent with “christmas” or “xmas” in it—different chimes for android-sent, iOS-sent, or web-sent cheer. It was a gentlemans bet to see which platform has the most spirit. (Note: all done by script, no human was ever privy to your messages.) The results are in.

Only 10% of android messages sent today rang the bell, while a full third of iOS messages (34.7%) were jingling-all-the-way. Our web users came in at 8%, cementing the case that iOS users are in fact the most spirited in these holiday times. What are you Android users talking about the other 90% of the time?!?!

In all fairness they may simply have more friends and family with whom to spend time face to face, instead of living out christmas on a phone. Or maybe they are the very sentimental types who sent out handwritten cards weeks ago, iOS users being the self-absorbed curmudgeons who would only remember a friend ON Christmas day itself. Whatever the case, the data are in, let the debating begin :)

One more thing… Merry Christmas from Moped Santa. We’ve got lots of presents for you coming in the new year.

musing the almost end of the world with @mobot

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 13:39:00 -0500

Dec 21st, we’re still here! There are technically about twelve more hours in which the world could end for the 2012 doomsday prediction to come true, but like CNN I’m calling this one early.

I sat down this morning for an interview on the topic with @mobot, our friendly system robot, and wanted to share that with you all. See the screen grab below: convo flows from the bottom up.

In case you haven’t already spoken to @mobot, he (she? it?) is a dependable shoulder to lean on. What he lacks in logical sense he makes up for in pure moxie.

Challenge: have your own convo with @mobot and submit any noteworthy ones to me directly at @adam. Pro tip: @mobot is shy, and will only reply if it’s a one on one moped.

How SquadMail uses Moped without messing up their flow

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 10:24:00 -0500

SquadMail makes forwarding emails and “Cc’ing” a thing of the past. The service (“Dropbox for email”) lets users share email folders in real-time. These email folders show up automatically in your mail client without installing any software. And folders have their own email address so you can email them directly.

The service itself is pretty neat and makes sense for teams that work with lots of email. When SquadMail is used in combination with Moped, you get a real email-hassle killer.

In order to get the most out of both Moped and email, SquadMail uses its shared email folders for various project groups and tasks such as “Product Dev,” ‘Marketing,” or “Investor Relations” among their team members.

Philipp, founder of SquadMail, says, “Now, whenever we moped about work-related topics, instead of Cc’ing individual team members, we send a copy of the moped to the respective folder’s email address (e.g. productdev@squad.cc or marketingmoped@squad.cc).

“This way we always have relevant messages all in one place. When someone new joins our company, all we need to do is add them to the folder and in the blink of an eye, they’ll be able to access the company’s entire communication history.”

Moped’s email integration helps SquadMail’s team stay connected, without messing up their own work flow. To try Moped out, download one of our free apps (iPhone, Android) or sign up on our homepage, moped.com.

Take photos with Moped

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 04:57:00 -0500

Now you can snap and send photos with Moped’s iPhone app, coming soon to Android as well. It’s fun, and easy to use.

You’ll notice a camera icon on the New Message screen. Tap the icon to take a new photo or upload one from your library. When the image is successfully attached, the icon will turn blue.

Photos inside Moped are square. Once you’ve taken a photo, you’ll be able to crop it to get the shot you want.

Since Moped works in your desktop web browser, too, your photos will show up immediately online. So, you can send photos from your phone, and the recipient can view them in the web app.

Download the latest iPhone app today and start sharing photos with Moped. Click here to get the new app today.

[How-to] Hacking your news feed for your team

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 19:35:00 -0500

This week we announced the first public use of the Moped API in our partnership with IFTTT, the web’s best tool for automation across facebook, instagram, weather data, and a host of other services. Today I’d like to showcase one of my favorite use-cases of this new partnership: an effortless hack to send news clips to your team right from google reader.

This is actually pretty simple, but very powerful. In IFTTT I setup a recipe that says “IF an article in my google reader is tagged with ‘moped’, THEN send a new moped with some details about it to our internal group, @mopedlabs.” Here’s a link to the shared recipe.

For IFTTT, we are the first outbound channel that lets you send to others— so while email and SMS each have their place for notifying you, IFTTT+moped let you actually send out to a group automatically for the first time.

For obvious privacy/spam reasons, you can’t send to groups that you’re not a part of. But you can setup your own groups for co-workers, family, a ski-house crew and modify the above recipe to go to yours. Click here to learn more about groups. It also works to just send to @handles of your individual contacts as well, if you can’t be bothered to make a group.

To see it in action, here is an example:

1) while going through my daily newsfeed, I find this strip by the oatmeal.

2) I add a tag to it (control-t), ‘moped’.

3) In a few minutes, the moped will be created and sent automatically by IFTTT, giving everyone in the group a push notification to their web stream or device. Assuming you are part of the group it was sent to, it will be available in your feed as well with a beautiful rich preview of the content. Lag time should be max 15 minutes, but is usually more like half that.

That’s it! Again, here’s the shared recipe: you can modify the tag that triggers it, the groups to send to, and the message formatting itself.

Happy mopeding!
Adam & Team

The Moped channel for IFTTT

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 08:14:20 -0500

The Moped channel on IFTTT is now available. The channel let’s users set up events that “trigger” an “action” from Moped. Moped has two actions at the moment:

Send a message to yourself
Send a message to someone else (either an email address or Moped user)

Here are some actions that will trigger a Moped message:

When Facebook stock dips below $15
When a new SoundCloud track is available by someone you follow
When someone posts a photo on Instagram with a particular hashtag
When a particular person emails me
When a new file is added to my public Dropbox folder
When a particular Facebook page is updated
When a particular item is added to Craigslist or Etsy

To send a message to another user, @-mention their Moped username or email address (e.g. @john@appleseed.com) in the message box when creating your IFTTT recipe.

Why does this matter?

Moped is a super simple messaging service using the familiar “@” to message other users privately. Moped connects to services like Dropbox, Twitter and Foursquare to do things other messengers can’t: Send files a la Dropbox, share specific places using Foursquare’s location API, and post content to Twitter directly from Moped’s mobile apps.

Up until now, Moped has just integrated third party APIs into its service. IFTTT is the first third party to integrate Moped’s yet-to-be-made-public API. More will be announced on Moped’s plans for its API next year.

Moped wants to make messaging more web friendly by integrating with web services that you use and love. With IFTTT, Moped connects your messages to a whole host of other services. And this is only the beginning.

To get started, download Moped for free in the iTunes Store, Google Play Store or sign up at moped.com.

Moped -> email

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 05:41:43 -0500

There’s a cool new hack in Moped: Send anyone an email from Moped. It’s really easy, just put the “at sign” (@) in front of any email address in a Moped message.

E.g. Hey, @jobs@mopedlabs.com, are you guys hiring?

(Answer, yes!)

Give it a go, try to email someone from Moped today.

Foursquare Hackathon in Our Office

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:21:00 -0500

We had decided to host the Berlin leg of this year’s Foursquare hackathon on Nov 3rd in our offices a while ago. Unfortunately the Foursquare team had to cancel their end of the hackathon because of the chaos created by the Hurricane Sandy. We considered cancelling as well but in the end decided not to cancel but to hold it as an unofficial event, mostly because we already had participants from other countries who had already booked flights to Berlin.

After the first participants started showing up around 10am we quickly realized how correct that decision was. It was a day of interesting hacks and cool friendly hackers.

Here is a list of hacks our participants attempted:

Amusemusic: A Node.js hack built by Bora (@grandbora) during foursquare hack day. This hack gets the last checkin of the logged in user and generates a playlist of related Soundcloud tracks using the Echonest API (github)
Take me Home: A Django hack by Hannes (@hc2p) and Isac (@ammurorei), which keeps track of your last foursquare check-in and makes sure you always find the best connection back home. The team is aiming to improve the hack and release it.
A hack by Carlos (@csaltos) to check in at Foursquare venues when you check-in to a meetup.com event using a Ruby on Rails application as a third party which receives the HTTP referer from a Meetup custom link.
A very secret hack by Martins (@grunskis) that won’t be published because it breaks a lot of API rules by various API providers. Let’s just say it gets your own and your friend’s checkins and displays them nicely on a map with some extra information.
The Journey is the Destination: A Django hack by Moritz (@mollitz) and me (@engintepe), which finds interesting foursquare venues for a logged in foursquare user along a route from A to B. Inspired by the Mongol Rally. (github)

We also had a lot of pizza and beer:

All in all, we are very happy to have hosted this hackathon. We had a ton of fun and met some really cool people. See you next time!

Engin Kurutepe
@engintepe

Downtime :(

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 04:14:00 -0400

We experienced some downtime yesterday. While we do everything we can to ensure our service is not interrupted, there are rare occasions when circumstances are just out of our control.

We apologize for the inconvenience. More information on what happened here.

Updated locations preview

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 11:18:00 -0400

Moped is the easiest way to share directions. Period. Being able to drop venues into messages is an absolute life-saver, especially when traveling.

We’ve revamped previews for Foursquare venues in Moped’s web client to display the most important information about a particular place: Name of venue, address and a map snippet.

Clicking on the venue’s icon or name above the map will take you to the place’s Foursquare page. Clicking on the map will open up Google Maps in a separate tab.

Add a place to a message with plus (+).

E.g. “Let’s grab coffee… at +St. Oberholz.” A list will drop down as you type, and you can select the exact place you want to drop into the message.