ImThere Blog

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!