ImThere Blog - Home

It's Just Sleeping!

2008-09-04T05:50:00Z

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

ImThere Updates

2008-02-06T19:25:00Z

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”.

Email Verification Issues

2008-02-05T23:26:00Z

If you’ve had problems verifying your email address the last couple of days, click the resend verification email link and try it again. There was an issue with the verification codes not getting saved. Sorry about that!

Update: Oops! Should really work now!

ImThere, 2008

2008-01-12T22:01:00Z

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!

One More Update Before the Eggnog!

2007-12-20T06:59:00Z

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!

ImThere in Real Time

2007-12-08T14:37:00Z

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…

Gettin' On The Radar

2007-11-25T08:49:00Z

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!

Big Things Draw Near

2007-11-03T17:38:00Z

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!

Press Pushin'

2007-11-01T20:08:00Z

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.

New Stuff Still Rollin' In

2007-10-18T04:46:00Z

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!

New ImThere Goodness

2007-10-10T06:43:00Z

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!

Slowness/Downtime

2007-09-30T07:28:00Z

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.

Have a Vitamin, On Us!

2007-09-26T13:18:00Z

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!

Spigits, Vitamins, and Improvements

2007-09-04T11:01:00Z

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!

More updates

2007-08-28T09:20:00Z

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