Dipity.com Dipity Blog

Our friends at circaVie are closing down for good in a couple of days.  In Dipity’s “good ole’ days” they were a company that made our knees shake a bit when we would analyze our competition.  After all, they were backed by megalith AOL and it seemed that they knew what they were doing, especially in terms of visual design.

They hit their niche well and built a strong following.  Unfortunately, they’re shutting down their site on the 15th.

We have been hearing from their users for the last few weeks asking for ways to get their data off the AOL ship and into the cuddly and everlasting arms of Dipity.  To respond to their pleas, we’ve built and released a life preserver today.

Visit the circaVie Timeline Import Page, log in or sign up if necessary, paste the URL to a circaVie Timeline, and click “Import Timeline”.  It’s that easy.  We’ll pull in as much as we can from your timeline.

So welcome circaVie users!  Please let us know how the import goes by clicking the “Feedback” link at the top of every Dipity page or by asking a question in our help site powered by Get Satisfaction.

Circavie Timeline Import Page

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.

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.