IMVU finally introduces the Friends Tab in version 417.12 which you can download here. Unfortunately, for someone like me with 871 friends, this tab looks mighty messy.

They haven't done away with the regular "Buddies list" of all just yet, but according to IMVU Staffer and Engineer N8Downs, "All the engineers are definitely itching to get rid of the separate friends window, but there's still some functionality that needs to be migrated to the new UI (e.g. settings) before we can throw that old code away. As you've observed, friends mode is a big step towards that, and you can expect to see more steps in that direction soon."

One of the functions of this new tab allows us to see what Public Rooms our friends are in. I foresee a lot of people screaming for the option to not use this new "feature". While I for one, don't really care that people know I'm in a Public Chat room, I do have an issue with it being so easy for them to locate me and come in. Let's face it - I love y'all, but I don't always want to be found and bombarded with developing questions. It's all very different from scrolling through the list of Public Rooms and having that little icon that said "One of your buddies is in here" and being able to look at the list of people there.

You can view the list in different ways - whether it be all of your friends or just those online. You can also see a sort of grid view which includes the pictures and a little information regarding that friend, or a more simplified list view. So seek out these options in 417.12 you need to click the small gear icon at the upper right in the friends tab section.

Unfortunately (yes, more negative stuff) the ability to switch back and forth between IMVU 2.0 and the UI of old will soon vanish as the old "buddies list" is done away with. There go my nice catalog images.

Of course a picture is completely necessary. My apologies to the people on my buddies list. It wouldn't look right if I blurred you all out. For the sake of giving you all the real idea of what it looks like, I chose to display only the friends currently online. (Click to make larger)

It's time for another IMVU Client Update. The next version is 415.6 and it is said to fix the inventory refreshing problem and the source of the crashes related to avatar cards.

To see a full list of client versions available for download, please go to http://www.imvu.com/download.php and be sure to bookmark it! It'll come in handy for sure.

At a whopping 90,000 (that's NINETY THOUSAND) users online simultaneously thanks to the hype of version 2.0 we successfully pushed the IMVU server to its limitations and caused IMVU to implode.

The website portion is currently down while the client seems to be in tact thus far (at least it is for me and the group of friends I'm chatting in a public room with). And it seems so long as you don't log out, you will continue to experience 2.0 at it's finest. IMVU has issued a statement about their technical difficulties here in their blog. Looks like until they figure out the issue, they are rolling back the 2.0 update. If you log out, you will then experience the prior update without the 2.0's UI.

I for one am impressed at the turn out. 90k on at once is certainly nothing to scoff at. That said, there was supposed to be a special, 2-hour sale fro IMVU's over priced credits and now the website is down. One has to wonder tho, how sales will be affected over the next couple of days for both developers and credit resellers. Will today's website black out harm sales, or will the overwhelming amount of active users make up for it? Stay tuned!