ImThere Blog

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely noticed that ImThere has been closed. Why ever for? Stay tuned for the full scoop!

Since Gorman is slacking on his blogging duties, I decided to blog about the recent updates myself. I’m not as great with words as gorman, so I’ll get to the point. Here’s what’s new:

• Fixed issue with meta tags not escaping content properly
• Hotness improvements
• Various changes to URLs to make them cleaner
• Improvements to contact importing on invitations
• Various changes/fixes with email verification
• Fixed links in invite email, welcome email, and mobile verification message
• Rewrote the carousel javascript – This fixes various issues with thumbnails/user icons not showing up and scrolling carousels
• Fixed issue with timelines w/ little content not initializing properly
• Fixed styling on pop-up calendars on event creator/editor and invites
• Fixed issue with comment caching which caused comments to not automatically update
• Added a notification for IE6 users about our current lack of support for their browser of choice (and recommend alternatives ;)
• Various html validation fixes
• Fixed issue with sorting by newest
• Fixed issue with username length on user carousels

I’ve mostly been working on the ImThere API, which is coming along quite nicely. Here’s some of the functionality that will be included:

• Browsing events, venues, artists, and users (obviously)
• Posting/updating events, venues, and artists
• Saying ImThere/BeenThere/SeenThem to events/venues/artists
• Favoriting venues and artists
• Setting your status message

Most of the api is already in place, if you want to start poking around. Just add .xml to a url. We’ll officially launch the API, with complete documentation, very soon. If you want more info on the API, stop by our API room on Campfire. I’ll try to idle in there and answer questions.

Also, Wes is working on some fun stuff which should be launching “any day now”.

With the holidays behind us, the team has been hard at work finishing the first update to ImThere in 2008. That update is now here! It brings us into the world of Ruby on Rails 2, the major new version of the platform ImThere is built on. We can now take advantage of all of the great functionality and performance enhancements that Rails 2 offers, which we’ve already started to do. In the process of all of this, we took the opportunity to overhaul our code base and get it in shape for a brand new year of development.

Not only is ImThere now faster and easier to build on, it also features a number of great enhancements and fixes:

• Rewritten search system that provide much more accurate results
• Rewritten related content system that provide truly useful suggestions
• Reworked timeline and content stream to load faster
• Clarified time display on the Going On Now bar
• Fixed navigation issues on various pages
• Improved tagging functionality
• Tweaked invitation system
• Tweaked mobile system usability
• Numerous styling improvements

All in all, this is an important update that will have long-lasting effects on ImThere. One example of that is our forthcoming API and sharing functionality that is now possible with this update. Expect that and a whole lot more in the near future. 2008 is going to be a great year for ImThere!

Before getting entirely consumed by the rapidly approaching holidays, we’ve managed to push out a nice little update to ImThere. Most of the work involved polishing the Real-Time Event system a bit more, but there are some other goodies too:

• The Going On Now bar now rotates happening events
• Timestamps on the Going On Now bar are now more clear
• Longer Real-Time Event descriptions no longer get cut off
• Editing a Real-Time Event now works properly
• Mobile reminders are no longer sent to you for Real-Time Events you post
• Resetting a lost password now functions as expected
• Various user page timeline cleanups

That’s all for now, but we’ve got huge plans for 2008. In fact, we’ll be releasing a great update directly following the holidays. Stay tuned for that as well as some non-code related blog entries I’ll be posting very soon.

Happy holidays from the entire ImThere team!

The team has returned from California, the turkey leftovers have been placed into the refrigerator to be forgotten about for months, and we’ve installed hand warmers to keep us typing away for the frigid months to come. A lot has happened since the last blog entry and the time has finally come to talk all about it!

As previously blogged about, we had the honor of presenting at Under The Radar at the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus. We had 6 minutes to explain ImThere to a room full of investors, people in the mobile industry, and press. After our presentation, a panel of 3 “judges” (spanning the aforementioned groups of people) grilled us with questions for 10 minutes.

Despite the numerous days of stress leading up to the presentation, it went as well as we could have hoped. The panelists were of course critical (that’s their job!), but all of the attendees we talked to expressed a lot of interest in ImThere. We had a bunch of opportunities to do this all-important networking, which we’re confident will lead to big things over the coming months.

Being at Under The Radar was the best thing that could happen to a company like ours. Needless to say, our trip out west was very valuable—especially when combined with the other great meetings we had outside of the conference. It was a bunch of fun too. Having the whole team together is always great, and meeting up with Wes for the first time was awesome. Hopefully we’ll all be together on a more permanent basis soon!

Now, let’s talk about the major functionality that we’ve been hyping up for the past couple of months. It was in fact launched, along with some other new nifty things, at the conference. However, we’ve left the biggest chunk of it unexposed while an extra coat of polish has been applied. If you’re especially crafty, you may have already noticed some of it. Either way, this coming Tuesday, the 27th, all will be unveiled here on this very blog and in… other places. Confused? Excited? Uncertain? Perfect!

See you Tuesday!

Update: Okay, okay, it’s a bit after Tuesday now. We’re still polishing, but it’ll all be in your hands any moment now!

We’ve rolled out one final update to ImThere in advance of the major changes that we’re launching at the Under The Radar conference on November 15th. This update consists of nearly 50 new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Here’s an overview:

The Friends tab sidebar now displays all friends’ status messages in one place. Venues and artists are now sorted by how many friends have added them as a favorite. Hovering over or clicking the favorite count displays those friends.



You can now invite your webmail contacts to ImThere

• Hotness now better handles local events and updates drastically faster
• Invitation and friend request emails and mobile messages have been cleaned up
• Notifications are now displayed and linked on the sidebar Inbox tab properly
• Favorite lists now scroll without ever getting cut off
• Tags were removed from event listings to give more room for the associated venue, artist, time, and date
• Invitations now better handle custom addresses
• WYSIWYG editor output is now rendered properly on content and user pages
• URLs are now auto-linked in descriptions on content pages
• Time-zone support improved for clarity
• Communication center message previews have been truncated to make scanning through messages easier; other UI improvements were made as well
• Numerous fixes and improvements throughout the site, especially with the friend and mobile systems

Overall, you should find ImThere to be very solid. We’ve reached the point where the base of the site is very stable, and now we get to build awesome things on top of it and make larger-scale changes. As mentioned, you’ll start seeing exactly that happen very soon!

If you have any thoughts on improving ImThere, please let us know on Lighthouse!

ImThere is really picking up as of late, thanks in part to some great press we’ve received. TechCrunch, one of the most influential blogs in the internet startup world, wrote a great piece about us. Getting on TechCrunch is a huge honor and will help investors, potential partners, and the early adopter crowd find out about us. Rex Dixon’s Technically Speaking wrote about us too, and so did CMS Wire.

All of this goes a long way in helping ImThere get on the radar.

We are, however, still not quite on it. That’s why we’re presenting at Under The Radar | Mobility on November 15th. We will have 6 minutes (plus a Q&A session) to tell an esteemed group of investors, leaders in the industry, and press why ImThere is going to solve the problems of the world—or something like that. The conference takes place at the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley, but the whole team will be out in that area for the entire week. If you’re in the area, get in touch and we’ll meet up! If you’re not, keep an eye on this event for live coverage of the conference.

Oh, and that super-secret system I’ve been teasing you about? It’s launching at the conference!

P.S. Sorry if you’ve noticed any instability with the site as of late. Our provide has been experiencing some network outages, which they believe are now resolved.

Yet another new round of ImThere improvements are upon us! Here’s what we just rolled out:

Popup calendar for easy date selection



Notification buttons to quickly accept or deny invitations and friend requests

That’s not all! Here’s the rest:

• Listing thumbnails are now always the correct proportions and size
• Unified address box for better international support
• Date/time displays and fields made more consistent
• Site message and comment text now included in email notifications
• Mobile and email notification text improved for clarity
• Smoothed out email and mobile verification functionality
• Tweaked the new signup system
• Guest visitor count on content pages
• Editors now show existing default picture
• Local only option when browsing artists
• IE and Safari rendering fixes
• Numerous bug fixes and performance improvements

As we speak, the team is hard at work on something truly revolutionary. We look forward to unveiling it very soon. Until then, enjoy the new goodies!

Sorry about the site slowness and downtime earlier tonight. We had an issue with one of our servers, things should be back to normal now.

As promised, our article is up on Vitamin! It’s a very honest behind-the-scenes look at what we’ve gone through with ImThere. The article includes how we struggled to launch the first version of ImThere, what we realized what was fundamentally wrong with it, the actions we took to correct those problems, how the current version of ImThere was built, and where we’re at now. Hopefully you will find it an interesting read (it’s long, but has tons of pictures!), and maybe it will help you avoid similar problems if you’re starting a website. Needless to say, we’re very thankful to the great folks at Vitamin for letting us share our story.

You can also find the article on Digg, YCNews, and reddit.

In preparation for the article, we’ve released a substantial update to ImThere! We began rolling out pieces of it late last week, so you may have noticed some of it already. Here’s what’s new:

A brand-new signup system that’s extremely fast, much more useful, and very pretty too!



A fully redesigned invitation system that’s much easier to use and access



Mobile and email notifications for nearly all aspects of ImThere—the mobile notifications are all interactive!



An upgraded WYSIWYG editor for many parts of the site



A simple way to invite your friends to ImThere. Give it a try; ImThere is much more fun with your friends!



Numerous enhancements to the message center that make it much more functional



Pretty spinners so you know your content is being posted or updated!

We’ve actually fully reworked our mobile system. It’s much more functional, and very fast. I highly recommend checking it out, as it really is cool. You can start by checking out mobile help page on ImThere. As you begin to receive mobile notifications, more and more functionality will be exposed.

In an effort to make ImThere as open and accessible as possible, we’ve integrated a number of microformats. We now fully support hCalendar, hCard, and XFN. These microformats make a variety of data quickly accessible through applications and browser extensions that support them. If you’re interested in learning more about microformats, this is a great place to start.

We’ve taken a number of steps to ensure ImThere can handle the ever-increasing demand. For starters, we moved to a new grid-based hosting company called slicehost. They make scaling a snap, provide completely automated backup services, and offer overall stellar service. We couldn’t be happier with them. They’re even based in St. Louis! In addition to moving to a better server setup, we’ve implemented a variety of caching techniques. Not only will all of this allow us to better handle traffic, but it should make ImThere many times faster for you!

There are a bunch of smaller enhancements and fixes we’ve rolled out too:

• Numerous IE fixes
• NowThere now correctly shows timeless events
• Changing your password now requires you to enter your current password for security purposes
• Corrected sorting on Events > Newest
• Birthday fields now work correctly
• Clicking a picture in any content stream now takes you directly to the clicked picture
• The sidebar calendar now correctly shows just the upcoming 3 days that have events

A number of smaller bugs have been fixed too. Needless to say, the team has been doing a great job. Our work isn’t done though, of course. We’re now working on something that will be truly groundbreaking and make ImThere much more fun and useful. Think I’m exaggerating? Wait and see!

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!