So, its 4:00 am here in Naples, FL and we just now got things patched up and running again. The problem actually occured when a log file grew to about 40gig without us aware of it and eventually used up all the space on the server hosting our IM gateways and hosed a bunch of stuff. Long story short, we spent the day rebuilding and making sure this doesn’t happen again. Thanks for your patience and support.

We had to shutdown all of our IM gateways this morning due to an issue with one of the gateways acting eradically. We’re working on it and apologize (again) for the downtime. We’ve been running with little to no downtime since we launched. While the past couple days things haven’t gone as smooth, please rest assured that we’re going to get things humming again.

The city in which our servers are located experienced a MAJOR power outage this morning. While we ran on the generator for some time, we eventually ran out of juice. As of 1pm est. we are back online!

IMified’s growing very fast and we’re working on some procedures to avoid this problem in the future. We apologize if this has caused you any trouble.

I’ll be headed across Alligator Alley tonight to attend BarCamp Miami and hopefully get a chance to demo IMified to the group.

More info on the event here.

Maybe. I have to say the folks over at Microsoft, more specifically the Windows Live team, have kept in contact with us since day one, and while we were told “no” last week it appears we may be able to workout a permanent solution to our problem with their help. I stress maybe, as this is all still up in the air. Just wanted to let you know that Microsoft did get your emails and has made it clear to us they’d like their users to have access to the IMified buddy on MSN Windows Live Messenger.

This one is killing us. After a week of back and forth emails with Microsoft trying to get our screen name to appear online to more than 1000 users at a time, we’ve been told no. The limit with MSN occurs when over 1000 screen names request presence for our screen name at any given time, meaning that if your not one of the lucky 1000, our screen name will appear offline to existing users and new users cannot be added to our buddy list.

Now, we certainly understand that MSN has policies in place that need to be adhered to, but AOL contacted us on day one to proactively offer a solution for a possible issue on their network and things have been running fine on AIM as well as Yahoo and Gtalk. The only option we were given was to build our service on their SDK and then and only then would they lift the limit on our screen name.

So, unfortunately there are a lot of MSN users out there who will not be able to access IMified. We regret this but tried to do everything we could to rectify the situation. If you think this sucks as much as we do, send an email over to: bizdesk@microsoft.com and tell them you want your IMified. If you signed up for us on MSN and would still like to use our service, please go ahead and signup from another network.

DIGG THIS

You now have the option to enter your mobile phone number in your account settings page to have your IMified reminders sent via text message to your phone if your screen name is not online. This means you’ll never miss a reminder even if, god forbid, you step away from your computer.

Just select the IMified menu option “My Account”, and click on the “Account Settings” link. You can choose to have reminders sent to your mobile, email, or both when your not online.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention this feature is free!

I should probably have my nose in some code right now fixing bugs and building new services, but I’d like take a minute to reflect and share on our experience launching IMified. In just 5 days we’ve gone from 2 users to many thousands and have been getting some really positive feedback. Our users have used IMified to perform over 25,000 tasks at the time of this writing! What really amazes us is this all happened by submitting one post to the Techcrunch company review forum. That’s it, just one post. The buzz that followed was a direct result of this post as we didn’t even try pitching our service to anyone else. The idea was to get some users in who enjoyed reviewing new services and get some feedback before doing any viral marketing. Lucky for us, that plan backfired and the news spread. We’re really proud of the fact that we’ve had zero server down time and just some minor network interuptions on AIM and MSN. AOL and Microsoft even contacted us to say Kudos! How cool?

We created IMified to solve a specific problem we were having in our daily work day. We wanted to find a way to add and complete todo’s in our Basecamp projects without having to open a new tab in our browser and login. What started as a nifty little hack turned into a service that can integrate all the tools we use in one place with a consistant interface that’s always on.

The point is, if your having a problem, chances are there’s others having the same problem. Go ahead and take a stab at solving it. Now back to coding.

Sorry to all those who signed up with an MSN screen name and couldn’t talk to us for a day and to those who wanted to sign up but couldn’t. As stated in an earlier post, our MSN buddy list reached its capacity and was no longer able to accept new buddies. This setting unfortunately is something we have no control over and are at the mercy of the networks our buddies live on. While we still haven’t heard officially from Microsoft that this capacity has been increased, it appears that it has.

The recently introduced stikkit api seemed liked such a perfect match for use over IM that we just had to get it up and running asap. You can now fire off your stikkits directly to your stikkit site from your IM client. Go ahead and get stikkit with it.

LiveJournal integration is also complete. Something we wanted to launch with but just couldn’t get to it. We’re really amazed at the number of bloggers out there using IMified to get those thoughts out of your head and into your blog.

It’s been a crazy first 4 days for us and we’re really excited about all the buzz. The users continue to stream in by the minute and other than our issues with MSN, things are holding up really well. We haven’t experienced even a second of downtime besides a few minor network interuptions on AIM and MSN. Kudos to Anthony and Brandon who setup and manage the IMified servers.

Keep sending us your suggestions and feedback, we’re listening.