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.

OK, so maybe that’s a little over-the-top, but we did put out a lot of cool stuff!  We’ve been really happy about getting used by some great sites like The Guardian, Fox, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Salt Lake Tribune, and Wired’s CultofMac (and a slew of blogs).  They’ve also been nice enough to give us some great feedback which we’ve wrapped up in our release this week.

Publishers can now control the size, color, background, default view, and time settings of their embeds, all from an interactive preview.  With the new “Embed Builder” it should be easy to make Dipity fit in perfectly with your website or blog.

It’s a little foggy in San Francisco, so we decided to make our embed “San Francisco Nights” themed for today.  Let us know what you think!

What’s Jiggle? It’s that little bit of gravy that makes your app go from functional to fun (think Treo v. iPhone). As part of our “hack day” competition/celebration, Ben got jiggly with it, and won himself the gold.

Our timelines now bounce, fade, fly in, slow with friction, speed up with a harder throw… it’s almost like they’re real.

It’s a subtle change for some, but totally fun and a great new usabilty standard for all of us. Start using your favorite timeline and you’ll notice, or if you don’t have one, check out mine.

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.