Happy Holidays

It's nearly that time again! - It's been nearly a month since our launch and our daily sign-ups are continuing to increase day over day. This week we updated both clients with new features – a 'block' feature that allows you to ignore selected users. We also added language filters as most of our larger sites requested this. We will be allowing users the option to turn language filters off in the near future.

Our friends at Friendster have been promoting us so we’re now seeing a considerable number of new Friendster users (http://www.friendster.com/incircles). We were also featured on a Microsoft.spaces.live hack site. These guys created a great way to put 'inCircles' on 'spaces' pages - so we're seeing equally high sign-ups on spaces too. As we predicted inCircles is most popular on blogs and social networks. The initial reaction to our products has been very positive and has fueled us with ideas for our beta.

This month has been very interesting. We found that we were overloading our servers so we had to take our client off some of our larger blogs until we increased our backend architecture. We are now significantly upgrading our architecture and you will begin to see a steady roll out of inCircles on larger blogs during the next few months.

We're also in the process of developing an advertising system that will allow publishers to share revenue earned from placing our clients on their blogs. We are inviting bloggers to contact us if they wish to learn more about this service.

Our beta development has begun and we're excited about it. What you see today is truly just the tip of the inCircles iceberg. There are some very exciting developments in the works and we’ll be inviting approximately 10,000 of our users/publishers to participate in beta trials - beginning early next year.

We wish you all happy holidays and want to thank all our users for making inCircles work :)

Simon
co-founder
InCircles

simon@incircles.com

Dugg and Crunched

This weekend saw a flurry of activity, with our fledgling company (and product) featured on TechCrunch and indirectly linked to from Digg. It was pretty exciting for a tiny startup with an alpha product.

We'd like to thank everyone for the overwhelming amount of positive feedback we received! At this point we are the victim of our own success, and spend nearly the entire weekend babysitting our server and reworking some of our backend code and rethinking some of the architecture. Getting placed on several large sites is an awful lot of traffic to serve up. In fact, we had to pull ourselves off the last large site we landed on - it more than QUADRUPLED our already-high weekend traffic instantaneously...

We also received a substantial amount of suggestions and improvements. Indeed, we are actively working every day to incorporate new and useful features into our young application and network. We've got big plans for an accounting system, user profiles, a network browser, a monetization solution to put revenue in the hands of our users, and lots of other things that we probably shouldn't even talk about at this point! :)

As you may have seen with the custom TechCrunch skin, in addition to providing a hosted chat solution, we are actively working with content destinations to deliver customized versions of our widget for their communities. We're thrilled to be working with the new media establishment (is that an oxymoron?) to help foster the development of vibrant communities around netvideos, podcasts, blogs, social networks, link directories, ... the list goes on! We think that our brand of fun and spontaneous communications will be an integral part of the new web!

Thanks everyone! More to come soon!

Mike H.
Chief Architect
mike@incircles.com

InCircles Launches 'CM' Network

InCircles has developed a proprietary communications platform that leverages concurrent messaging and interactive meta networks built on top of the web.

Breakthrough - Unlike existing IM networks that restrict you to one-on-one conversations with people you already know, InCircles is the first truly distributed CM (Concurrent Messaging) network that connects concurrent web users en masse!

InCircles immediately detects a user's presence on a website and allows them to communicate with everyone else - in a group with select friends, privately one on one and collectively on the web page itself.

InCircles enables users to form groups and traverse the InCircles meta networks, which consist of high-density sites where other users are discussing their favorite topics in real-time. Unprecedented group travel allows users to surf the web in packs, ushering in a new era of real-time interaction and content sharing!

InCircles can be embedded on millions of sites - unlike their competitors, InCircles technology also functions over many common filters and widget impediments (e.g. MySpace). Simply drop the code on your site once; thanks to a Flash-based frontend, all future updates will be automatically pushed to the user when their page is refreshed.

As a publishing tool and traffic accelerator, InCircles allows websites to be connected to one another via a meta network, resulting in a boost in traffic and user-base that wouldn't have existed otherwise. InCircles allows both conceptually disparate and similar sites alike to exchange traffic by sharing contextual relevancy across the InCircles network, giving users the ability to deduce what's happening on a publisher's page at that exact moment .

Their Popular Pages feature allows InCircles users to connect to other popular sites in their network. InCircles will be making this feature even more relevant to individual users in their beta release.

Unlike existing IM suites, InCircles is offering considerably more customization for websites that are looking to increase their traffic and user interaction. For a limited time they are offering FREE skins. InCircles are now inviting site publishers to contact them to discuss the numerous customization possibilities

Step One

InCircles started life six months ago on a sailboat in Marina del Rey when Zach Fierstadt (formerly at MySpace) and Simon Foster (usually busy making commercials and music videos) were chatting about the possibilities of IM on the web and the lack of innovation over the last ten years.

Since then those ideas have evolved into a startup. We now have a talented team of nine people and hope to be hiring more very soon. We bootstrapped InCircles up to this point. We're very close to launching our 'alpha' InCircles CM (concurrent messaging) platform. What you see now is just the tip of the iceberg. We'll keep you posted as we get closer to rolling out the next generations of InCircles.