Saturday, July 07, 2007

The Power of Timelines and tools for making them

History is important; it provides the context for everything else we experience.  Timeline are great tools for communicating that history.  A timeline can help you explain the history of your adopted country or your mission's work there.  It's a great way to give your supporters an overview of your work over the long-haul.  And it would provide a short-term missions team an overview of where they fit in the scheme of things.

Up until now it's been difficult to create timelines that could be easily embedded in a blog, powerpoint or website.  The first I found was the Timeline at SIMILE.  It has the advantage of being flexible and embedable.  It provides some neat formatting options and looks really sharp.

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The downside was that it all had to be coded in XML (a sort of language) and run through an embedded player on your website.  I got this working, and embedded the result on my web site but every time I fiddled with and event I messed the whole thing up.  It was too delicate for an amateur like me.

 A few days ago I discovered XTimeline, a timeline creator for the rest of us.  It's still in beta but is already very, very powerful.  It's easy to create a great looking timeline in a short period of time.  I've embeded an example below, but to really view it as it's designed click here.

 

These timeline are very easy to produce.  Go to XTimeline and create an account.  Click on "Create" and you'll be taken to a dialogue box like this one:

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Give your timeline a title, category, image and so forth and you're on your way.  Next, add some events. Click 'add event'  and fill in the dialogue box.

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Add enough events and you're beginning to tell your story.  XTimelines is also a "social" application.  That is, depending on your settings others can comments on your timeline and/or events.  Others can even edit your timeline if you'd like. 

When you're done, embed your timeline in your web page or blog to help people understand your story.  Whenever you edit your timeline the new information will be reflected on your web site.

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Note that this product is still in beta and that there are some ease-of-use tweaks to be made.  I hope these guys stay around a while.  As a history buff I love tools like these.

 

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4 comments:

LK said...

Hi Jeff, I'm glad you found xtimeline, and thank you for such a wonderful writeup of our site.

We're still in the process of making improvements to our site and rolling out new features. You mentioned some ease-of-use things that could be changed; I'd love to hear what those are so that we can look into making such improvements.

You can reach me at lauren at xtimeline.com. Thanks!

Best,
Lauren
CEO and Founder

Jeff said...

Lauren, thanks for stopping by and commenting. XTimeline is great and the more I use it the more I like it.

I've actually left a bit of feedback, using both "feedback" button and in the site's forums. Frankly, I've been surprised at how little "developer activity" there is in the forums. There are currently 14 open topics in the feedback forum and only 6 have any developer comment.

Take this feedback for what it's worth: When you solicit feedback from your users and don't acknowledge its receipt, you break the user-developer feedback loop and users will quit offering feedback.

That said, I love the site and will continue to use it and point others to it. I want the xtimeline to do well!

LK said...

Thanks, Jeff, point well taken. We have been a little remiss at answering all of the forum postings. We've been swamped with building out some significant new features for the site, but as you say, we do rely on our current users to feed us ideas on what's working and what's not. Please keep writing to us. Let's continue to keep it an open conversation.

Best,
Lauren

Jeff said...

Lauren, that's a deal!