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Rise of the PHX

Sociable Timeline via Dipity

Posted by Gregg on April 2, 2008 in Web 2.0 |

It was one of those moments I am often faced with. An idea creeps into my head that causes an immediate rifle for the laptop to search for said idea to see if another had hatched it at an earlier date. My search term, ‘social timeline web 2.0′. The second hit was an article from Information Week by Fritz Nelson from March 4th entitled Dipity Do Social Timelines. Usually I do these searches and the tool has been online for well over year but this time the baked goods were still fresh, according to their own company timline they announced the alpha at SXSW 2008, on March 8th. In perusing the site I found it was exactly what I had in mind and immediately attempted to embed my social time line in The Rise. At first I only got a blank time line, but after reporting a bug Zack with dipity had the embed feature working beautifully. Also of note, I had a great back and forth with BJ Heinley on Dipity’s Get Satisfaction page. (On a side note, if you are a startup or a mega corp, Get Satisfaction is an excellent tool for customer support and feedback no matter what industry in which you call home).

The result is my newly added Sociable Time Line section of the site. My plan is to migrate much of my web wander logs into this section and Dipity has an excellent interface to bring meaning to those wanderings. Example: say I write and post a really jaded, disenfranchised entry on the site you can correlate it to a last.fm scrobble of Rage Against the Machine on the time line. I also noticed the Dipity folk are already working on integrating with facebook, which is awesome.

Overall awesome tool. If you get stuck with some app weirdness, first remember this is the alpha release and take two breathes. As a pioneer you will lose a wagon wheel or two. Second use the feedback forms or jump on Get Satisfaction as BJ and crew will be there for ya.

Some tips:

Micro vs Macro:You may want to craft timelines as either macro or micro level. What I mean here is if you bunch all you sites together chances are you will be like me where one social network will track your birthday, so unless you have been blogging/twittering since you were 3 there will be a vast amount of empty space. So my plan is to create a macro_Me_timeline and a micro_Me_timeline, and spread my feeds between the two.

Think about your audience: you may not want to post all you delicious links if you incessantly bookmark NSFW content. For my current employer I set up a feed that outputs every news release ever posted on the site, then routed that to a private time line. The result is The Biodesign Institute time line.

Moving forward:

A couple of things I would like I have on my wish list for Dipity:

1. Be able to see the feed details after I add them. Example: Deli.cio.us(http://del.icio.us/rss/riseofthephx)
2. Be able to sort feed priority, so those with greater weights are shown higher up on the time line, it looks as though the blog entries are positioned high now which is nice.
3. Dipity time lines have their own RSS feed that can feed additional time lines. A few examples: One family member’s time line could feed the time line for the entire family, a subsidary group can feed a corporate parents timeline, etc.

I am new to the tool so if this functionality is in place please be kind in your RTFM rants please.

Big bonus to Dipity creating the tool sans(w/o) Flash as the end user can easily modify look and feel via CSS and the information is much more accessible.