ImThere Blog

September is gearing up to be a good month for ImThere. Starting today, ImThere is being featured on spigit. spigit is a “simulation engine” for startups, which means a startup like ImThere can have the spigit community determine how successful they think it will be. This happens through their review and “spig/scrap it” system, as well as a virtual stock (or, “spock”) market. The spigit community can also interact directly with the startup through a discussion system.

We think spigit will be a great way for us to get feedback on what we’re doing with ImThere, hear tips from other entrepreneurs, and get some exposure too. Feel free to signup for spigit, review ImThere, give it a “spig” (hopefully not a “scrap”!), and participate in the discussions we’ve started to help make ImThere better and more successful.

You can view the ImThere listing on spigit right here. Thanks to the spigit folks for letting us get involved!

We’ve got more in the works too. In the very near future, there will be a full article about the development of ImThere on the very popular site Vitamin. In the article, we take an in-depth look at what went into coding and designing the site. If you’re curious about why ImThere is the way it is, you should find this article interesting. As soon as it’s published, expect to see a dedicated blog entry about it here.

In preparation for all of this, we’ve taken steps to make ImThere a better experience for new (and existing!) users. Here’s a list of the improvements we released today:

• The location of a logged out user is automatically determined, which allows accurate local content to be displayed throughout the site and the location field on the signup form to be predefined

• The timezone of a logged out user is automatically determined, which allows localized dates and times to be displayed throughout the site and the timezone field of the signup form to be predefined. Existing users may adjust their timezone on the settings page

• Friends requests and invitations are now placed into the “Notifications” tab of the Communication Center to separate them from regular messages

• Several IE and other display-related issues were resolved

• Picture uploading now better handles errors

In addition to these fixes, a reworked invitation system and the remainder of the IE fixes will be rolled out this week. Over the next few weeks, expect to see some major improvements relating to images and the signup system as well as a new, huge, secret feature! By the end of the month, we’ll be releasing sharing and integration functionality, which should make ImThere much more useful for you. Details on that and everything else will come soon.

If there’s something you’d like to see added or improved on ImThere, don’t hesitate to tell us in the comments, on Lighthouse, or on spigit!