Dipity.com Dipity Blog

One of the things we get to do from time to time is take the technology we’ve built and focus it in a new way. First we did this for videos with TimeTube for YouTube, next we focused on images from Flickr with Tickr and now we give you Digg Days for Digg.

The greatest thing about Digg is that you can see what’s hot right now across a wide range of categories. The problem is, if you’re new to the site, or if you can’t remember that story someone sent you a couple weeks ago it can be hard to find. Enter Digg Days.

Basically, we took the Digg API, Dipity API and built a mashup that gives you a few great ways to Digg deeper. You get the top story for each day, in each category, since the day Digg launched. All this data is naturally organized on the Dipity timeline, list, map and flipbook views. You can also do a keyword search to find all the matching stories and they get ranked by the total number of Diggs.

So far, Digg Days has been Dugg over 1000 times and from the comments, people love it. While there’s been no formal endorsement from Digg as an ‘official tool’ it’s great that a service like Digg allows creative people to build interesting things on top of their service in areas they’d likely never have the time explore.

I woke up this morning, started responding to some user feedback, went to our bug tracking software and….loading….loading….loading. Not good. Next stop www.dipity.com, same result.

Looks like we’re experiencing a bit of a downtime. We’ve rolled up our sleeves, gotten out hardhats and pulled out our screwdrivers. In short. We’re looking on to what’s going on and why were down. I’ll continue to post updates as they become available.

Timeline and Update:
7:55a PDT - First report of downtime
9:08a PDT - Working with our hosting company to restore service

9:36a PDT - Site returns, cause still under investigation.

While at the GSP conference I had a chance to catch up with the fine folks at Information Week / TechWeb. They were kind enough to take some time to learn about Dipity and actually point a video camera at me.

Check out the full article.

At the first night of the GSP West Dipity was chosen to participate in ‘AppNite’, a contest that pitted 10 products against each other with the high stakes of fame and more importantly an Macbook Air. The contest took place with attendees from both GSP and eTech and was scheduled just before the Tim O’Reilly evening keynote presentation so the house was packed. Each presenter was given 5 min. to pitch and then the audience voted via SMS.

Aside for losing a minute of our time to some technical issues (the A/V gods were not smiling down on us), the demo went very well and many people came up afterwards and asked questions about what we’re doing with Dipity and where we’re heading next beyond Facebook.

This was really the first time we’ve gotten up in front of a large crowd and put it out there. The response was great. People got it, they wanted more, they got ‘the big idea’. It’s always nice to have some external validation for what you’ve been pouring yourself into for the past 9+ months.

When all was said and done we came in a tie for second with another app with 22% of the vote. The winning app was an analytics platform for developers, which isn’t surprising given the focus of both the conferences on developers.

Just a quick post to share some of the new features we’ve been working on and are now live!

‘You’ Timeline improvements - We’ve made Your Timeline better. You can now edit all of the events on the timeline (even the ones that come from FB Photos or your FB Profile). So you can change ‘when’ they happened and appear on your timeline! - You

Topics - We’ve launched topic timelines. You can now find over 22,000 timelines about bands, actors, movies and other things and if you don’t find what you’re looking for you can create your own timeline, about anything!

Find - Create

Contribute, Follow and Comment - You can now add your own events to topic timelines or click ‘follow’ and get updates from Dipity when a timeline has been udpated by other friends and Dipity users. You can also now comment on a timeline.

Share - Topic timelines can now be shared to friends as links, embeds or FB messages. You can also grab the timeline of your favorite band and drop it into a weebsite, blog, myspace or bebo page with our embed code. Just click the ‘Share’ button above any topical timeline.

We’ve gone public! - Each topical timeline is now available to non-Facebook users who can look at and explore a timeline without being a Facebook user so you can share them with the few people out there that don’t yet have a Facebook account!

Britney Spears Timeline

Let me know if you have any questions!

One of the big features we rolled out recently was the ability to grab a timeline and embed it in to anything. Got a blog? Got a wiki? Want it on your MySpace page? Well now you can take any public timeline and grab the code for it and drop it anyplace that will take HTML.Here’s an example of an embed. This is a timeline of the Jurassic 5.

We’ve just been in our SF office (on Harrison and 5th) for about 2 weeks now. We’re just hitting our groove. We’ve got a printer, figured out how to work the heater and sort of stocked the fridge with all the goodies you need to build product. Every thing is humming along until…this past monday.

I came into the office early on monday for a meeting with a prospective partner. As I walked up the stairs I noticed the sisal rug looked a little discolored. A little more investigation and the mezzanine and ground floor of the office was flooded. Our printer fried. It seems the upstairs neighbor had a little plumbing problem and the water had been running from early in the evening the night before until I noticed it at 8AM the next morning. The water damage control people have come in, pulled off some of the drywall and are running a bunch of fans and a ‘Dirzzmaster 3000′ (or some such contraption) to pull all the moisture out of the walls.

Needless to say, the office is not workable in it’s current state. So we’re being nomads this week. If you know of space that could accommodate a team of 5 or so for a week, please let me know.

Those Google guys are always coming up with nifty ideas. Today it’s a new collaboration feature for Google Maps:

Now imagine if all the surfers around the globe worked together, leveraging their combined knowledge to create a single map of the best surf spots worldwide, applying the power of wiki-style collaboration to cartography.

Now, if someone could only do that for timelines!

This morning Google is set to announce the Open Social API to compete with Facebook’s platform.

Marc Andreessen thinks most social web applications will be published in multiple versions for the various platforms:

Are people really going to maintain multiple sets of front-end pages for their web sites for Facebook, Open Social, etc.?

I think so, yes. I think any web site going forward that wants maximum distribution across the largest number of users will have a single back-end, and then multiple sets of front-end pages:

• One set of standard HTML and Javascript pages for consumption by normal web browser.
• Another set of HTML and Javascript pages that use the Open Social API’s Javascript calls for consumption with Open Social containers/social networks.
• A third set of pages in FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that use Facebook’s proprietary APIs for consumption within Facebook as a Facebook app.
• Perhaps a fourth set of pages adapted for the Apple iPhone and/or other mobile devices.

Interesting.

When it’s just 2 or maybe 3 of you working together on something, day in, day out, it’s easy to be on the same page, have a shared vision and make sure that things are moving. There’s transparency because there is no other option. Double the company from 3 to 6 people, put the team in 2 different places (SF and Austin) and you have to be ‘crisper’ about how you manage what everyone’s doing and plan to talk more then you would normally talk about something.

This past week we put in place what I would call ‘SCRUM-Lite’ or SCRUM– There are a couple of fundamental changes that we’ve implemented such as a daily update meeting (10 min.), a weekly product planning meeting (1-2hrs.) and a bi-weekly all day, all hands product strategy meeting. Additionally we’ve moved to weekly product releases. The goal is to push out new features week to week as well as decide what we’re doing next on a more ‘runtime’ basis so we can course correct as we get more and more feedback from users.

So far it’s working well, few kinks here and there, people are getting used to using the Trac ticket system and supporting it with the wiki when needed. It’s not a ton of structure but it seems to be just enough to keep the wheels moving and more importantly keep the team motivated and put some more momentum behind the product.