Dipity.com Dipity Blog

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.

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.

It’s official, the Dipity HQ in Austin, Texas is up and running, with the internets finally connected, whiteboard hung and ready for action. The inaugural hanging of the whiteboard is what makes any office complete, right? Or is it plants… or a stapler?

You wouldn’t think getting the internet up and running would be too bad, considering ‘them Google boys‘ are about to occupy the entire second floor here at the Scarbrough Building (check out this Google Sketchup of the Scarbrough Buillding), but that’s where the Verizon National Access Card came in handy … internet access anywhere, anytime.

If you happen to be in Austin and feel like dropping by, we’re at 101 6th Street Suite 612,  on the corner of 6th and Congress. Back to work!

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!