Dipity.com Dipity Blog

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!