Dipity.com Dipity Blog

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.