Dipity.com Dipity Blog

We’ve always been fans of our the good folks over at Mashable. In a sea of tech blogs, Mashable chooses to ‘Go Deep’ in social media. That’s why when they named Dipity’s TimeTube as part of their mashup ‘Awesome 8‘ we had only one response: Awesome.

We’re in good company so check out the rest of the folks on the list and if you’ve some how missed out on TimeTube ch-ch-ch-check it out!

Dipity Tutorial #1 (A Basic Overview) from Derek Dukes

You asked for it! We’re rolling out a series of video tutorials! We hope these tutorials will begin to address some of the questions about Dipity and set you up to be a power Dipity user. We’ve built these based on feedback e-mails and from our Get Satisfaction presence. The videos provide step-by-step visual demonstrations and narrations of different Dipity features! You can find them on Vimeo and YouTube. We’ll also be rolling out a page on the site that has all of the videos, look for that shortly. We’ve got 6 more in production which will zoom in on certain features so you’re getting the most out of your Dipity experience.

Cheers

Visa's Go Visualization

Advertising Age just published an article on how the next frontier doesn’t seem to be better search, but better synthesis. Given that there are so many people publishing images, video and text (tweets, blogs etc.) the velocity of that information is increasing and there are so many point of views on each event that we’ll need better tools then just search to make sense of all of the information. 

Garrick Schmitt says ”the art of “data visualization” has exploded recently and it is fundamentally changing the way we create and consume narratives about events, products and services”, here at Dipity we couldn’t agree more. We’re constantly thinking about how best to aggregate new types of information, sort and display those in the most interesting ways to improve the context of the information we have access to.

It’s a great read check it out here: Data Visualization Is Reinventing Online Storytelling

I took a field trip today to talk with our newest customer, San Jose Museum of Art . The museum is using Dipity on their web site, and they had let us know they were using it on a kiosk in the museum.

I was not prepared for this…

WOW! I got a little teary-eyed when I saw that for the first time. Kind of like what it must feel like for a parent who sees their kid off to college.

They told me that this was a very popular feature, with some folks spending lots of time exploring the timeline, and other visitors watching. Imagine that — timelines as a spectator sport!

We’re very impressed with how SJMA is using Dipity, and we discussed many more possible uses for them — not the least of which is a museum timeline that can use Dipity’s content update features to notify interested visitors when a new exhibit is added to the schedule.

This was truly an inspiring meeting…

Today we released new sharing features focused on events, with an emphasis on Facebook integration.

Now when you are looking at an event you can share it with anyone.  Be it on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, or Facebook.  The link that is sent out will bring a person back to the timeline page with that event popped up (and optionally to the original asset URL for our paying customers).

Click the Facebook icon, authorize Dipity to post to your  Facebook wall, then preview what it will look like. One of the coolest parts of the Facebook integration is that if you share an event with a video on Facebook, your Facebook friends can watch the video right there in your Facebook mini-feed.

This gives you a new channel for sharing, whether it’s your favorite video found on one of our MTV Video timelines, an event from one of the celebrities who use Dipity, or if you represent a brand or personality and are looking for a platform to simplify managing your content on the myriad of social sites online.

Give it a shot, and give us a shout if we can help out.

If video killed the radio star, what did the internet to do video? While you ponder that check out the latest and greatest from the Dipity Labs: Dipity.TV 

What is Dipity.TV? Think of it like a video jukebox. All your favorite bands, all of their videos organized as only Dipity can do it. You can surf your favorite band’s videos on an interactive timeline. Not only do you never have to give up Rick Asley but you can see how Michael Jackson went from the ‘King of Pop’ to the ‘King of Flop’.

Beyond just individual artists Dipity.TV is a video time machine. Rocking out to your favorite hair bands of the 80’s is just a click a way with ‘Best Of‘ timelines by decade. It’s not just about oldies but goodies, Dipity.TV also has a pulse on who’s hot now such as Rihanna, U2 and the hard to resist Jonas Brothers.

We wanted to show the great things that can be done when information moves freely.  Each search also helps Dipity.TV build its huge collection of MTV embed codes, which MTV is providing only until mid-March.

Enjoy!

This week we rolled out a new datafeed importer. If you’re currently using a Simile Timeline in your site, giving Dipity a whirl is only a couple of clicks away!

Simply create a new blank timeline. Then add a “Simile Timeline XML” datasource to it, and point us to the URL where your Simile XML file is located. You can continue to update your Simile XML with whatever mechanism you use, and Dipity will pick up the changes at least once per day.

After you get the timeline in Dipity, explore the cool features we make it easy to use. Add a video, a photo, or a map all with our interactive interface. Switch to look at the different views, and then with only two clicks, get embed code that you can use back on your site! Our goal is to make this as easy as possible, so please send us feedback if you run into any trouble.

Simile excels at packing a lot of text into a small space. It has some really cool features like variable time scale and the ability to mark eras. Dipity is geared more toward showing off your media and giving you and your viewers a rich experience. Simile requires any changes be made to a source code file, while Dipity gives you a web interface to build your timeline, a REST API to push and pull content from, and a feed infrastructure to gather data automatically from other sources.

Monet Timeline on Simile (click image to interact):
 

The same timeline XML data, but visualized on Dipity (click the image to go to the Dipity timeline page):
 

David Huynh, the creator of Simile, has moved on from MIT and is now doing amazing things for Metaweb, just up the street from us in San Francisco. We look forward to spending some time with him to talk shop.

With the help of a hotshot designer and information architect from New Zealand, Dipity got a makeover today.

Petra Quilitz of Quilitz&Quilitz Ltd really got into what Dipity stands for and submitted a very comprehensive set of ideas for us.  We were absolutely floored with her understanding of our problem space and her ability to execute on that understanding.  We haven’t implemented everything that she suggested (yet) but made some important strides today.  Awesome work, Petra!

With this redesign, Dipity takes a step forward in the timeliness of its look and feel, gets bolder and sharper, and first and foremost showcases your content.  We’ve decided to forego the “sunny day in the park” thing we had going on, and instead let your content do the talking over a neutral background.  Giving you the ability to choose a theme for your timeline is on our shortlist of to-dos, so if you really liked that fair weather theme you will be able to get back there soon.

There are some under-the-covers things that went out today that should make things feel zippy, and be easier on your computer’s processor and memory.  We also started using Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network last week, and that’s proving to bring a measurable improvement to page load times.

Most of this is in preparation for some more very exciting stuff we’re going to be rolling out in the next week or two.  I can’t say much yet, but our focus is going to be on offering our incredible platform to whomever wants to use it, however they want to use it.

Please let us know how you like the new look and feel by sending Feedback from the site.

These are awesome times to be a Dipster!

In the spirit of change that seems to be every where these days. We here at Dipity HQ have decided to get caught up in it as well. As of last week we started testing out different versions of things. Some fancy people would call this ‘A/B’ testing; As in some get to try A and try B then we get to see which one works better. Anyhow, it’s sort of like small little lab experiments. We have some ideas, we test them, some of you will see them for a short them then they will go away. The bigger goal is that over time we roll in our learning into the product and Bam! New Awesomeness!

So what do you have to do for all of this? NOTHING! Just use the site as usual, if you notice something different and you like it, maybe let us know, if you see something you don’t like, PLEASE let us know by sending us feedback.