03
- October
2008
Posted By : Adrian Chan
Dipping into Dipity — scaleable timelines
I’m quite enjoying playing around with Dipity. The site falls another lifestreaming app, butwhere many run the stream vertically, and page-by-page, dipity uses a horizontal timeline display. You can zoom in on the timeline scale to drill down. And in addition, it shows posted content by flip book, lists, and maps.
It’s great to see innovation at the presentation layer like this. While those of us “in the stream” much of the time may not make much use of stream histories or archives (excepting by search), the view here would be a value add to those monitoring and tracking Twitter.
I could see a conversational map done in this fashion, perhaps using loops or circuits. Similarly, network graphs built around replies as well as shared followers. It would be cool, too, to see scatter plots of memes for high volume activity. Visualizations like this may not be the best applications for daily use, in particular, but they can help simplify and process of filtering and browsing through high-volume messages. A hashtags application of the timeline, for example, plotted as a trendline with scatter points.
My congratulations to the team. This is looking good!
Here’s a timeline on the topic Meltdown_2008. (I can’t speak to whether or not the timeline’s long sense of history should be read as in indictment of economic policy, or simply a wikification of current news!)

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