Dipity.com Dipity Blog

After TimeTube’s resounding success, we decided to show that it’s not just videos that can be organized and displayed in a more interesting way. Next up were photos, so naturally: Time + Flickr = Tickr!

The images themselves are really stunning (thanks Flickr users!), but it’s also a really neat way to explore a topic (or your own Flickr account).

Seeing is believing, so try some searches and have some fun.

Some that caught our eye were:

• Burning Man: Artists really know how to make things look amazing :). Get a recap of the best from each of the last few years.
• September 11th: This one is sad and heart-warming at once. You can see the the old New York skyline, the day-of from around the city, and then the memorials shine into the sky.
• Northern Lights: Experience the phenomenon as seen from around the world, and as it changes year to year.

Hope you’ll try it out, and remember to write in with your thoughts and favorite searches!

As the first of many mashups to come, we launched TimeTube today… and couldnt be happier about how it turned out. It really seems like we fired on all cylinders for this one… it’s clean, simple, shiny, and best of all totally useful. TimeTube adds a dimension to YouTube that I’ve never seen before… it lets it tell you a story. A few examples:

I could go on forever, but nothing I say will be as cool as seeing it for yourself!

Being down for 91 minutes yesterday easily raised the company blood pressure a good 91 points. But, we’ve added infrastructure, built out our failover plans, and collectively breathed a small sigh of relief.

I think it may be a rite of passage for a web startup to go down at exactly the wrong time, which in our case meant having just been posted to lifehacker and embedded in hundreds of sites.

Here’s hoping we got ours out of the way early! In any case, we’ll go into our weekends feeling good again, and taking comfort in knowing that downtime problems are only problems because so many people care.

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.

A few days ago Dipsters got together to celebrate our official 1 year anniversary as a company. Derek was semi-elusive all week about his plans for an offsite for April 12th, which turned out to be a row of seats at AT&T Park in San Francisco.

It was windy and chilly in the shade (BK almost had to buy a sweatshirt of shame, but was saved by Zack, Ben, and Eric who left to find a sunny spot in left field bleachers). Madelaine and Ryan managed to get ahold of a huge WAD of caramel popcorn for free, and even though she denies it, I think Madelaine might have eaten the whole thing.

At about the 6th or 7th inning, the words Happy Birthday Dipity showed up on the screen (thankfully distracting us from the pain of Giants game). The words helped remind all of us that celebrating a birthday is not only marking the accomplishments of the year before, but a way to look forward to the year to come.

As a new company it’s often hard to see ahead even 3 months into the future, yet I am confident that with more sweat, teamwork, and a little luck, Dipity will be celebrating it’s 2nd year in no time at all!

Thanks to everyone who’s helped us out up to now. Hey! Hey! Whaddaya Say!

Hey You. (Yeah You!)

Go ahead and go on to Dipity.com and get your time-based FREAK ON. I challenge you to make a timeline of no less than 10 events on your favorite topic, a band, your kid, or George W. Bush, or whatever you want. Even yourself.

What’s the reward? The prize? The cupcake? You get to be one of the founding fathers/mothers… one of the SHAPERS of things to come with Dipity. We need your Feedback, and if you can actually BREAK stuff, be sure and tell us about it, OK?

Thanks you old son-of-a-gun.

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.

That’s right .. it’s a roving RV travelling around Austin to the different SXSW parties. It’s the brainchild of RubyredLabs Jonathan Grubb and Kestrin Pantera. Dipity is contributing to the effort.

Send a text to 40404 and type ‘follow rviplounge’ to get twitters of our locations and happenings. Hope to see you!

UPDATE:

{RV}IP was spotlighted in the towards the end of the interactive part of SXSW, with Derek getting caught by Times photographer Tony Pierce.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/03/rvip.html

RVIP Boing Boing ‘d (sort of)

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/18/cool-personal-notes.html

(look in Mike’s notes, there’s a little miniature RVIP van)

………………….

The RVIP Lounge was something that we were able to sponsor last minute
and proved to be a huge success and created a nice amount of buzz for
Ruby Red Labs (our co-sponsor) and Dipity. The concept was simple,
rather than sponsor a party or event at a fixed location let’s create
a moving party that never stops. We rented an RV, had some banners
created and loaded it up with a Karaoke machine, booze, a projector
and all the fixings for late night nachos. The RV rolled out each
night around 5 and updated people on location via twitter (follow:
rviplounge) and usually shut down about 5-6 in the morning.

Great Job Jonathan and Kestrin! RubyRedLabs

Derek and BJ will be representing (but not presenting) at SXSW in Austin this week, getting our fill of nerdiness and bbq.

Email BJ at bj [at] dipity dot com to hook up!

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.