Dipity

» see dipity.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dipity's stated mission was to organize the web's content by date and time. In practice it gave you a blank horizontal strip and let you drop things onto it: a photo with a caption, a video, a link, a paragraph, each one pinned to a moment. You could zoom the strip out to decades or in to a single afternoon. When it was finished you got an embed code, and the timeline worked inside somebody else's article the same as it did on your own page. Nothing about that is remarkable in 2026. In 2007 it took a developer and a week.

The company started in San Francisco in 2007 on about $900,000 of angel money, with Derek Dukes as chief executive. The 2.0 release in 2008 was the one that mattered, because it stopped being a tool you filled in by hand and started pulling from other services automatically. You could point it at a Twitter account or a Flickr stream and watch a timeline assemble itself. One of the features was called the Archaeologist, and it would build you a chronological strip of everything Digg had surfaced on any term you gave it. Later that year Dipity ran an Election Center of American campaign timelines, which is the kind of thing that puts a small startup on a very large number of screens.

The adoption numbers that get repeated are large and poorly sourced, somewhere around 8.5 million users inside the first year. What is verifiable is where the embeds turned up. The Washington Post used it, and so did the Huffington Post. Teachers used it harder than journalists did, because a timeline is the native shape of a history lesson, and for several years every list of classroom web tools had Dipity near the top.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what got buried with it ~

The thing about a hosted timeline is that the work and the hosting are the same object. A teacher who spent a term assembling a timeline of the Ottoman decline had not made a file. They had made a row in somebody else's database, reachable at a URL on dipity.com, embedded in a page that would keep showing an empty rectangle long after the row stopped existing. There are posts from people who lost years of compiled research this way, and no export ever came.

Dipity's content was also unusually hard to reconstruct from the outside. The timelines were assembled by JavaScript from an API, so the archived snapshots mostly give you the page furniture with an empty frame where the content should load. What the crawlers saved was the shell.

~ the quiet exit ~

There is no shutdown post. There is no farewell page. The last working capture of the site is from 24 September 2016, and by the beginning of 2017 the domain was returning an error. Today dipity.com does not resolve at all, which is one step past dead: the name was not even squatted. One founder, BJ Heinley, went on to build Thinga, a search engine for children, which is also gone.

Dipity's users were American newsrooms and American classrooms, and that is the whole of my distance from it. A school project here in 2008 was a PowerPoint file on a flash drive, carried in a pocket, handed over in person. That format was ugly and it was mocked at the time, and eighteen years on the file still opens. Everything the Washington Post built on Dipity is a blank space in an old article.

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