The Iminta.com Development Blog

Hi all,

A few new features to mention this week. We’ve been doing some under-the-hood work so our feature update is kinda small this week.

First up, Myspace. You can now enter your MySpace user id and we’ll pick up your blog posts from the service. If there’s other data there that we can get to (i.e. that has RSS or Atom Feeds) we’ll add it as we can. If you have suggestions, feel free to leave us some feedback below.

Next, Facebook. The only RSS that we can get from Facebook of your activity are your update changes (the short little descriptions you can add about what you’re doing or feeling or whatever). Grab your RSS feed link from your mini-feed page and enter it into the Facebook account information and we’ll pull these updates into your profile.

Finally, we’ve completely revamped our fancy bookmarklet. Now it opens a dialog box in the page you’re bookmarking, so IE users won’t have to worry about their popup blockers anymore. Additionally, you can now choose a thumbnail for your post from the images on the page. Just pick one of the images when you’re submitting the link - it’s pretty straight forward.

We’ll have more goodies for you in the next week or so, so stay tuned as usual. Invite some friends and have fun.

The Iminta Crew

It’s been a busy week here at Iminta and we’ve got a lot of fun stuff to show off. Here’s a quick index with details and screenshots to follow:

• Iminta Favorites
• Blog It
• Email It
• Youtube Uploads, Picasa, and Mixx
• Iminta Mobile improvements
• Speed improvements, various bug fixes

Iminta Favorites

Ever have something in your feed that was really awesome and thought to yourself, “How can I make sure my friends see this thing amongst everything else I stumbled across today?” Well, now you can highlight anything in your feed by favoriting it. This will highlight the item on your page so it stands out a bit. Your friends can filter your list on favorites, so if they’ve not caught up with you in a few days they can focus on only the important stuff.

Favoriting something also makes sure it shows up in your friends’ email the next day (provided they aren’t using their email filters don’t exclude the content). So if you favorite 20 youtubes and there are 3 or 4 that mean a lot to you, you can favorite them to make sure they make it in your friends’ emails the next day.

When you favorite something, you have the option of writing something about it. This lets you add your own commentary to the description that comes from youtube or digg or whatever. It’s a nice way to add a personal touch to the stuff in your feed.

Finally, this feature has been integrated into the Iminta Bookmarklet so that you can favorite something right when you add it if you’re using the bookmarklet. When you click the “favorite” checkbox, you get the option of entering the favorite text in addition to the description (both are optional).

Blog It

Now you can take stuff you find online and push it out to your blogs as regular blog posts. We currently only support Wordpress but we’ll add more soon.

To blog things you’ll have to configure your blogs in your profile. You can add as many as you like, which lets you post to as many as you like when you want to publish something from your feed. When you click “Blog it” you’ll have the option of editing the html in a WYSIWYG editor before it gets sent to your blog.

Email It

Found something cool and want to tell someone right now? Well, you can email anything from your feed (or from anyone else’s feed) to anyone you like. You can pick from friends on iminta or type in any email address (or pick from your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail address book). You have the option of entering in text that is used only for the email, so you can add a message that’s private without it showing up on the site.

This feature is also integrated into the Iminta Bookmarklet so that, after you bookmark something, you can immediately send it out to friends so they don’t have to wait until they check the site or tomorrow’s email to see it.

Youtube Uploads, Picasa, and Mixx

When we first added Youtube we somehow forgot to fetch vidoes that you add to your profile. Previously we only fetched favorites. Now we get both.

We’ve also added support for Google’s Picasa web albums.

Finally, we’ve add Mixx to the mix. Items you submit to or vote for on Mixx will get pulled into your feed.

Iminta Mobile

Iminta now has a mobile app (http://m.iminta.com) in case you missed it. We’ve added the ability to favorite things from the mobile app as well as the ability to filter on your and your friend’s favorites.

Also you can now go straight to a person’s favorites without logging in or navigating through your friends list by visiting iminta.com/mobile/u/<username>, for instance, here’s mine. Using this url, you can even embed this interface into your own site. Here’s my (Aaron) feed:

Various layout tweaks, speed enhancements, etc.

We get great feedback from you guys and try and address things when they come up. Mixed in with these new features are numerous layout tweaks and speed enhancements. As usual, if you see anything off, let us know!

- The Iminta Crew

Two new fun things went up on the site today: Email filters and our Iphone/Mobile interface.

Email Filters

A lot of you guys read the emails every day as your primary method of keeping up with the site. But this can get crowded if you have a lot of busy friends. If there’s stuff in there you don’t really read every day (*ahem*twitter*ahem*) you can turn that off now.

Here’s watcha do: Log in to your account and go into your profile and click on email prefs. About half way down the page you’ll see a link for Daily Update Email Filters. Click it and you’ll see something like this:

Filtering by different types

Sometimes you just want to turn off everything from a given source. Let’s say Last.fm isn’t rocking your inbox, you can just turn it off in the By Source view, which is the default. You can click on the By Type view to turn off content of a specific type. You can turn of all photos, or you could turn off only Last.fm songs, but not the weekly artist update. Finally, you can open the By Friends view and turn of a specific user’s content. You can turn off all their stuff or a portion of it. Here’s what that looks like:

Note that this view takes a little while (10-20 seconds) to load depending on how many friends you have, so be patient.

We’ll be integrating these persistent filters into the browsing experience on www.iminta.com soon, and we’ll do the same for our new mobile interface. Speaking of which…

Iminta on your Iphone / Mobile

We’re really excited about this one. Sittin’ at the train station and bored silly? Iminta can clue you in to what your friends are up to no matter where you are with it’s new, nifty mobile version.

linkage: http://m.iminta.com

Here’s what it looks like:

You can quickly browse through your own feed, the feed of all your friend’s stuff, and browse into a specific friend’s stuff. You can leave comments and even “Get inta it” which will add a friend’s item to your own feed so your other friends can find out about it.

We’ve tested this with the iPhone and a few cellphones that we have around the place. If you have a second try it out. Let us know if something goes wonky.

Have fun!

The Iminta Dev Team

Here’s a quick round up of what’s new on Iminta recently:

• When you post comments on twitters you can choose to post the comment back to twitter as an @reply.
• When someone replies to you or posts a comment on something of yours you’ll get an email about it immediately (you can turn this off in your email preferences).
• The iminta bookmarklet lets you add stuff you find anywhere on the net to your feed without having to use Digg or delicous or some other service. Just add it to your bookmarks, visit something you like, and click it.
• These little buttons now show up on stuff others find on the net. Click it to copy it over to your own stream and share it with your friends.
• You can now edit the titles and descriptions of your stuff so when you digg something that has a lame title or inane description you can change it to make it more useful or interesting.
• You can now choose how your name will show up on the site (in your profile). This can help friends figure out who you are when they see your whacky username. Your options are:
  • username
  • username (a.k.a. FirstName)
  • username (a.k.a. FirstName LastInitial)
  • username (a.k.a. FirstName LastName)
• You can now search for friends using their names, usernames, email addresses, or put in your user/pass to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or AOL to pull in your address book and find others.

Have fun!

Yeah, it’s been a while since we launched and, until now, we didn’t really have a way to share what we’ve been up to, but no more!

More to come as we roll out changes and stuff. Stay tuned.