So if you’re building any kind of social networking style application you need to think about how you’re going to get this off the ground. How is your application going to be fun and useful for the first user? We’ve thought a lot about the empty room problem for Imity and we think we have a good answer, which is: Here’s what our empty room looks like. At the Reboot conference we did a bluetooth scan of the room. The result was overwhelming. There’s so much data out there. Bluetooth is already on, it’s just that nobody’s really paying any attention. Yet.

Trying to explain things that are not already in the world to the world can be difficult. What to leave out, what to stress, choosing metaphors, etc.

Your turn
So I’ve put up a brief note explaining Imity in few (or no) words. Now I’d love to know: Which other three things do you want to know about Imity before you know anything else? Any three things, really. About the company, the people or, yes, the product. (Email me if you’re shy)

We’ve had a lot of discussion at the office about this blog and the website around it. It’s all too easy to fall into some kind of “let’s look corporate” trap always posting as the corporate “we” and trying to stay “on message” through a strict editorial process but that, frankly, is both boring and dehumanizing. Morten found a good discussion on Flock’s blog about this. I like the quote “If you don’t pay attention you drift towards a closed model” and I think it’s true there is a silence trap.

Our informal company motto is “Default Open” (which just means that we think that is really, really important) and we don’t want to close up we decided to broaden the scope on the blog and just blog whatever we find interesting and somewhat related to what we do here. So enough with the We already!. I’m Claus and I’ll be blogging a lot more over here from now on.

(p.s. Yes I realize that I accidentally did this post using the corporate “We” user for Wordpress. Ahh, the irony)

Tour de France, empty room, full room, space, not place. As promised, here is the Powerpoint presentation from Claus’ talk at the Where 2.0 conference. Or, rather, the Here 2.0 conference, as you’ll notice. Also, make sure you see the attending bloggers’ notes.

Bluetooth might seem like a strange technology to use for location based services like Imity, but Bluetooth has some major advantages

1. It’s out there. No need to wait for GPS phones, RFID identifiers or smart carriers surfacing the location data they already have. Bluetooth is in million of phones already.
2. It’s enough. The key thing is what’s around you, not where your are geographically. Bluetooth does that kind of scanning very, very well.

Here’s how Wired News explained a great Imity scenario:

” Let’s say you’re at a conference in a strange town and you walk into the break room to get some coffee. You see a few familiar faces, but you can’t remember any of the names that go with those faces. You ask yourself, “Where did I last see that guy? Have I actually met him before? Didn’t we talk over email?”

Then you pull out your Bluetooth device and fire up imity. You can see who’s in the room with you — as long as they have some sort of wirelessly connected phone, PDA or laptop — plus the time and date you were last in a room with them, how often and where you’ve seen them in the past few months, whether you’ve ever called them, emailed them, visited their blog, and so on.”

Exactly! This is really one of the core “what if we could do this” we asked ourselves when defining Imity. We’ve all got a lot of social value locked up in lost memory.

Hi there, we’ve been busy reacting to feedback from Where 2.0 and getting ready to road test Imity (still got a few more weeks to go on that, by the way) - but that’s no excuse for not feeding your gracious interest in Imity!
One of the great things about speaking at Where 2.0 was that so many people just got it and started dreaming up uses all on their own.
I’ll be posting a couple of quotes where people have supplied use cases of their own for Imity.