ImThere Blog

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!

After months of anticipation, the top-secret system we’ve been hyping is here. It’s called Real-Time Events. Instead of wasting 2,500 words or so, I’ll let the following video do the talking. Check it out:

Snazzy, huh? The brand new mobile help section is a great reference for creating these newfangled Real-Time Events. Also, check out the Real-Time Event example Real-Time Event!

Go try it out!

Oh, but there’s more… much more. The team hasn’t been messin’ around. Here’s a look at some of it:

Flash-based streaming video. Send in a video from your mobile phone (or through the site) and it will show up right away on an event, your profile, or whatever you send it to. The same still applies for pictures.

Facebook on ImThere. Invite your Facebook friends to events right from the event page. Webmail contacts can be invited the same way. ImThere, Facebook, Webmail, and custom contacts can all be invited at once. They can be invited to ImThere itself too.

Mobile Account Creation. Have your friends send in their videos and pictures while you’re at an event—they no longer need to be a registered ImThere user. After sending in their first message, they will be prompted for a username and then supplied with a password. Their submitted content is automatically linked to their newly formed account, which they can customize once they return home.

Mobile made intuitive. All ImThere mobile interfaces have been completely retooled for ease of use. A brand new mobile hint bar has been added to provide contextual help for interacting with sections of ImThere from your mobile phone. Those hints tie into the brand new mobile help page.

GeoRSS support. Paste the URL for any ImThere RSS feed into a GeoRSS-enabled mapping application, such as Google Maps, and all local events will be overlaid on the map.

Complete hCard, hCal, and iCal support. Add events, artists, and venues to your calendar and address book with one click. For the best experience, install this plugin for Safari or this plugin for Firefox. You can alternatively use this bookmarklet which works in IE too.

Much, much more. Over 40 other improvements, tweaks, and fixes have been included in this update. The most notable of the 40 is drastically better support for Internet Explorer, as well as tweaks to perfect ImThere in Firefox.

This is by far the biggest update we’ve launched. Have fun with it all and let us know what you think! Of course, there’s always more to come…

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!

Another round of improvements have hit ImThere! Here’s the latest:

• Added a Favorite button to the artist and venue listings
• Only one user page comment notification is sent until you revisit your user page
• Timezone support improvements
• # of friends going on the Friends sidebar calendar now links to the “User Going” section of the event
• Calendar overlay placement tweaks
• Numerous bug fixes and small tweaks

As always, more to come!

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!

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!

Just rolled out another update to the site. Some of the changes include:

• Friend names are now clickable on imthere/beenthere/seenthem/myfriend buttons
• Fixed issues w/ date/time display on event listings
• Various stylesheet fixes
• Fixed friends page headers showing up where they shouldn’t
• Fixed case sensitivity issues with user profile tabs
• Fixed remaining issues with certain event/venue/artist pages giving random 500 errors
• Fixed an issue with the mobile system

You may have noticed intermittent crashes on some content pages all day yesterday. We had a slight problem with the new related content box that caused some pages to crash. I managed to track it to a bug in our search system, and have patched it up. Things should be reliable again :)

It’s update day! We just pushed out a bunch of great new features and fixes. I think everyone will find ImThere much more useful as a result. First off, here’s a visual overview of the big stuff:

Use the completely new Friends tab to know where your friends are at a glance, view their upcoming and past events, and check out their favorites

Check out your friends upcoming events with one click from anywhere on ImThere

Know what events, venues, artists, and users your friends have said ImThere, BeenThere, SeemThem, and MyFriend to at a glance

Auto-detectable RSS feeds almost everywhere

Reply to a comment without leaving the page

Discover new events, venues, and artists through the Related box on all content pages

Invite your friends to events

The invitation system actually went out a bit ago, but I thought it was worth mentioning in case you missed it. Everything else is brand new, however. Those big changes aren’t it though. Here’s a rundown of the other improvements:

• Mobile functionality works from verified email addresses (this is for you, iPhone users!)
• Message center cleanups and fixes
• Chat-style ordering of Live Comments
• Timeline calendar updated to show event titles
• “Now at” notification tweaks
• Distance sorting fixed
• Real name and birthday display and privacy settings on profile
• Picture loading and thumbnail improvements
• Hotness accuracy enhanced
• Latest activity improvements
• Tag page updated to search event titles too
• Additional content type icons added
• Tightened up the site header

We’ve rolled out lots of great stuff tonight, but fear not, the team is already back at work on the next round of updates. The upcoming major features are shaping up to be very impressive, so keep checking ImThere and this blog!

The whole team has been hard at work polishing the newly launched ImThere. Here are just some of the 100+ improvements and fixes we’ve made just in the past few weeks:

• Mobile functionality fixes and improvements
• Site-wide formatting cleanups
• Sort options on all listings
• Default pictures for events, venues, and artists
• “Holiday” event category
• Venue and artist category icons
• Venue category cleanups
• Thumbnails are better displayed
• Scrolling for full-sized feeds
• Checkbox for viewing just upcoming events
• Checkbox for viewing just local artists, venues, and users
• Ability to set a hometown for an artist
• Areas without content are better handled
• Disabled states for scroll buttons when there’s no content to scroll
• Mouse over and down states for scroll buttons
• Clicking ImThere, BeenThere, SeenThem, MyFriend or adding an artist or a venue as a favorite while logged out takes you to the signup page
• Sidebar status changing usability improvements and a spinner
• Days with more than 3 events are better handled on the sidebar calendar
• Upcoming events will now always show in the sidebar calendar
• New message notification on the sidebar Inbox tab
• Pictures in content streams and timelines are better handled
• Design tweaks to the logged out sidebar
• Clicking “Send username a message” or the message icon on the sidebar fills in the “To” field with the appropriate username
• Latest Activity on listings is now the actual latest activity for that item
• Mobile help page created and linked in the notification box
• Search, tag, and non-local community pages display all content (no longer just content in your region)
• Link to get directions for an event or venue
• Renamed “Profile” tab to “Details” on event, venue, and artist pages
• Birthday user profile field stays set
• Interests user profile field updates correctly
• Locationless events are better handled
• Renamed “Latest” and “Recently Added” to “Newest”
• Corrected content stream sorting
• Fixed numerous browser-specific issues
• Admin functionality

That’s a lot of stuff! The site should feel a lot better now. Needless to say, we’ve got bunches more on the way. Fortunately though, the site is to the point where we can spend more time on larger new features, which will make ImThere much more useful. For instance, our awesome invitation system will be launching this week. As always, we’re appreciative of any suggestions or bug reports you may have. You can tell us on Lighthouse!

On a final note, I want to welcome Wesley (monki) Beary to the team! He’s our newest developer, and he’s already contributed a lot to ImThere. He brings a lot of experience with him, and we’re thrilled to have him on board. With his help, we’ll be able to push out a lot of major improvements very quickly. I think you’ll be surprised to see just how much ImThere evolves over the coming few months.

Thanks very much for using ImThere. We hope you’re having fun with it! Tell your friends :)