Put A Spin On Your Lifestream With Dipity
Apr 25 2008 
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Have you heard of Dipity? I hadn’t either until today. Dipity recently came out of private beta to a full launch last week. What is Dipity? Dipity allows you to create a timeline out of your lifestream. Though some users may glance over the service, it’s really worth a look. It’s not trying to be the next Friendfeed and has many features to help it stand out in an already saturated crowd.
Kudos to Jeffisageek for pointing this service out!
Timeline of Feeds
Your timeline is made out of feeds or your user account with Picasa, Twitter, Pandora, WordPress, Last.fm, Flickr, Yelp, Blogger, and Youtube. This is a relatively small amount of services to stream, which is why you have the option of adding numerous RSS feeds. You can also add events to a timeline, images, a Google map, a link to another site, and even Youtube videos!
A Plethora of Views
Once you’ve added your feeds you can take a look at your stream in four different views: timeline, list view, flipbook, and map view.
Timeline
Here you can see a visual timeline of everything that you’ve added based on the time an item was published. There’s a zoom feature that allows you to zoom in and out of your timeline by day, month, or years. The longer the length of time, the smaller your timeline view will become. Here’s a look at the ‘Week’ view.
List View
This is a personal favorite of mine. The list view is simple enough and reminds me a lot of partial RSS feed views. There’s nothing particularly special about this view, but users can appreciate the simplicity of it after being in the timeline view long enough.
Flipbook
The Flipbook view is very nice, but stutters a bit in Firefox. Clicking on the blocks at the bottom will allow you to ‘flip’ through your stream.
Map View
Powered by Google, the map view would be a neat tool for users that have items that are geo-tagged, or tagged with a location. This is also more suited for events that you may add to your stream rather than the feeds you may be adding.
A Host Of Features, A Solid Product
Other features include timelines that can be embedded and shared, and previewing an item. Click on an item in the timeline view and you’ll get a pop-up preview of the item, which is a really neat feature for blog posts that are shown in your stream. You can read the entire post right from Dipity. However, if you want to add a comment you have to head back to the original post. Smart move Dipity. :)
Dipity is a really cool visual lifestream service and has a host of other features that you’d simply be better off seeing for yourself. They’ve put a spin on lifestreaming with the integration of viewing your lifestream in different displays. You can also create more than one timeline, which would be fantastic for sharing feeds in groups, like Reddit Elite. This is something to keep an eye on and I’d love to hear your thoughts about it.
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I wonder if you could use Dipity to run an nonprofit timeline. I read the terms of service and it doesn't seem to exclude that use.
Neat idea. I don't see why not.
I'm totally going to do it. I asked them if they could add a nonprofit category.
Also, I just noticed that they included my full name in the URL of my timeline. Not cool. So I won't share right now. But I will if I can get that tweaked.
Here's mine: http://www.dipity.com/user/engtech/timeline/Eric_T
Kinda scary the amount of time I spend interrupting myself online.
This utility is really cool and I want to make my timeline live and share it with people. But I don't want to share my full name with the world. You required my full name in the signup process. But they didn't tell me it would be part of my public profile or the URL to my timeline. They've got some other issues that would improve my experience but this goes back to very basic privacy issues. I've submitted this to their support forum but have gotten know response. At least one other person has the same problem.
I honestly never thought to see about that, though I use an alias online. That's a serious problem though. I wonder why the hell they'd even think to do that. Who would actually want that as a default?
They told me that my full name wouldn't show up to people except my contacts. But I might not want my contacts to see my full name either. Think Twitter, etc. No matter what though my name shouldn't be in the URL. I hope they fix it. … Man, I sound whiney.
No, you sound like a consumer who's having a problem that you shouldn't have
to worry about. :)
No, you sound like a consumer who's having a problem that you shouldn't have
to worry about. :)
No, you sound like a consumer who's having a problem that you shouldn't have
to worry about. :)