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While tracking your web and social media history is pretty cool, it’s not nearly as engaging, presentable and useful as creating a curated digital timeline. The difference here is that with a curated timeline, you are adding the information yourself, not relying on search, APIs, RSS and other methods to collect your data. Besides, social streams are only really relevant if they update automatically.

Having timelines constantly refresh from 3rd party sources is technologically complicated (at least to me) and expensive as it puts quite a strain on the ol’ servers. While we look for the best way to implement autoupdate, you can still manually update a timeline, if you manage to remember to check back in.

So, while displaying your social stream certainly serves a purpose –tracking your digital footprint, creating context around an issue, exploring a current event– we believe users can get the most value out of their timelines by manually building them, event by event. To demonstrate what we mean, we decided to create a NASA Space Shuttle Program timeline in anticipation of the upcoming final mission in this epic and scientifically fruitful project.

The timeline includes every NASA space shuttle mission starting with Shuttle Enterprise testing all the way through the final mission on June 28, 2011. The history of the program is long and the amount of information is vast. Five shuttles flew 132 missions, orbiting the earth 20,022 times over a period of 1289 days 9 hours and 52 minutes (according to Wikipedia.)

With such a huge amount of information it’s tough to gauge the scope and reach of the program. However, if we can take all that info, sit down, and display it graphically somehow… say… on the axis of time, it becomes that much easier to understand and process. That is what Dipity does, provides users with an easy-to-use and powerful tool to take data and visualize it in a way that encourages learning, discussion and discovery.

Viewing the timeline is informative and great for visual learners, but the process of building the timeline can be even more serendipitous (hence the name, Dipity.) To show you how, let me break down how I built this Space Shuttle timeline.

First, I found my info. There are a lot of ways to do this: a preexisting data set such as your company history, using Wikipedida or other web resources, or with other search tools like Google’s timeline search option.

Google’s awesome timeline search function:

Second, I decided to focus on NASA missions, rather than preparations, breakthroughs, advances in technology, etc. It is important to pick which elements of the data set you want to focus on because many topics have so much information surrounding them it can become overwhelming.

Third, since I had the information at my disposal, I decided to make a timeline for each of the five NASA shuttles. Each of these took between one to two hours to complete. I used the mission logos, which made for a perfect visual compliment to the information on the timeline. After I created each timeline, I circled back and used the Dipity “Copy Timeline” function to add each timeline to a master NASA Space Shuttle Program timeline.

Here are a couple of the individual timelines:

Space Shuttle Atlantis:

Space Shuttle Challenger:

Finally, I plan to promote this timeline by embedding it in my blog, putting links out on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and more. Why spend all this time curating a beautiful, useful and informative timeline and then not get everyone in my address book to look at it and comment on my work? Although I am not the type to bug others to look at my sweet hipstermatic photos or Facebook posts simply because they are in a different context, such as a social stream, I am willing to share a timeline that might help my friends learn something new.

So what, exactly, is the end result of the six or seven hours of work that went into curating this timeline? Well, hopefully other sites will pick up and use the timelines in news articles, posts and tweets. Maybe a journalist assigned a piece on the shuttle program will use the timeline for research purposes. Perhaps someone interested in space travel will find the timeline and learn a thing or two about where we have been and what the future of NASA might hold.

In the event that none of that happens, and the timeline slips by unnoticed, at the very least I am now a de facto expert on space travel. I learned about the carbon-reinforced carbon, heat transfer, atmospheric reentry, how often the International Space Station is resupplied, and more. Hopefully NASA will see fit to put me on one of the last two flights. I think I would be an excellent crew member and would like to offer my services as a “time machine expert.”

Anyways, this is just one example of how curated timelines serve as extremely valuable content. Dipity offers a solution that goes beyond the “cute” world of tracking social media and enters the realm of genuine data visualization and research. As journalists, corporations, politicians, scientists, teachers and students look for new ways to collect and display information, Justin Time is there ready to blast off. Join us in exploring the final frontier of the internet: time.

Thanks for reading!
-Steve, Community Manager