As 2022 comes to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on this past year and celebrate the highlights!
We’ve been hard at work to help your team build strong connections, hold meaningful conversations, and feel closer together even when you’re cities, countries, or even continents apart!
We’re incredibly proud of everything our team has accomplished, and are more inspired by our customers than ever. Here’s a look at some of our biggest moments from 2022!
Making a global impact
Gather’s mission is to use the metaverse to break down physical barriers and increase access to opportunity no matter where in the world you or your team are located.
Millions of users entered a Gather Space in 2022, located in 193 different countries and 66,000 cities around the world.
We also launched the Gather Ambassador Program (GAP) this year with 24 third-party, independent companies from around the world.
The Gather Ambassadors are specialized in building amazing custom-designed Spaces, managing offices and events for remote teams, building API integrations, and much more. Check out the full list of Ambassadors here.
Gather has truly become a global platform, and we’re incredibly humbled by the number of people we’ve been able to bring together in virtual Spaces.
Creating a place for conversations
One of the core components of Gather is the ability to use spatial audio and video to walk up to someone and start a conversation, just like you would in real life.
Between all users on Gather, there were millions of hours of conversation that took place in our Spaces in 2022. This is why we invested so heavily in the Meeting Experience on Gather earlier this year.
We released a new Meeting View, which puts everyone’s videos into a grid and fades the background of your office to help you stay focused. We added privacy controls to help you hold private conversations with confidence. And we released our Gather Meetings Chrome Extension and Gather Slack App to help you create one-click meetings in Gather from the tools your team uses most.
As much as we love meetings, however, we love that Gather gives you the ability to chat with coworkers anytime – no scheduling required.
In fact, 1 out of every 10 conversations was an unplanned, water cooler conversation. (Meaning it happened away from someone’s desk and there was no event on the calendar for it).
We’re thrilled that Gather has become a place where your team can brainstorm, make decisions, and get to know each other – with or without scheduling a formal meeting!
Helping remote teams build culture they love
Beyond helping teams communicate and collaborate, Gather helped everyone have some fun this year, too!
Users had their avatar dance 10.8 million times in 2022. (If you’ve never done this before, you can press ‘z’ to dance!)
Teams loved customizing their virtual offices. There were 31.4 million objects placed in remote workspaces this year!
The most popular object throughout all Spaces was a Go Kart. In total, there were 14.5 million Go Kart rides in 2022!
And perhaps the most exhilarating stat, users threw confetti 75.3 million times in 2022. (You can do this by pressing ‘f’ to throw confetti!)
The best companies know that the best results come from teams that are well connected. Little moments like these go a long way to creating a work environment that’s energetic and a joy to be a part of.
Focusing on product excellence
As much as we love building big new features, 2022 was the year we learned to slow down to focus on launching quality releases that put the details first.
In fact, our team held an entire sprint dedicated to fixing 116 bugs and small improvements.
Some of our favorite updates from that sprint included:
- An icon for guests so you can better identify them in your Space and in the Participants Panel.
- Updates to the Follow / Lead feature, so office tours feel more natural.
- A bunch of bug fixes to the Gather Grand Prix Social!
Want to learn more about how our Engineering, Product, and Design teams organized this sprint? Go behind the scenes here.
Beyond our “Details” sprint and major meeting experience updates, the team launched a bunch of releases this year to help your remote team do your best work in Gather.
Some of the highlights include:
- A new board game social
- Desktop notifications for Mac and Windows
- New ways to react during meetings
- Background blur to hide chaotic home offices
To keep up with all of our latest product updates, follow along here on our blog.
Looking forward to 2023
We’re constantly amazed at how quickly the Gather product and community have grown, and we’re grateful for the support from our customers, Ambassadors, and employees.
We’re excited to continue helping your remote team build a place that fosters strong connections, a sense of presence, and a little bit of joy throughout your workday.
To help us on our mission to eliminate barriers to opportunity and connection, check out our open positions on our careers page. Or join the conversation with other community members on LinkedIn and Twitter.
