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.

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!

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.