Have been looking at solutions for creating timelines, initially I was thinking offline but how primitive would that be… I want my timeline to be social and very open… What I’m looking for is something like the stock tracker at Google. It’s so much more than a timeline, the way it handles market data over time is simple and elegant, unfolding the more you explore it and linking all the page elements dynamically. (my expectations might be a little high).

There is an open solution from the SIMILE project at MIT called Timeline, (actually most the software is called timeline). This project is now freely available here. It’s good but lacks an interface to input data, although it reads XML which is certainly the right way to be doing business these days. It’s also missing a zoom function for the selected time range. Kind of essential unless you view history in chunks.

I tried some other solutions including: timeline creator, timeline maker, read/think/write timeline, our timelines amongst others… They were very…. mediocre.  All offering the ability to add/edit points in time, some allow linked images and media but few let you scale and none are social. The flex2 based Timeline Creator was very close but unfortunately only available in French. Hopefully a translation will follow soon.

Looking at the online solutions it appears to be a booming area, I have to keep returning to this post and adding more solutions to the list below. I have tried to create an example in each of them to demonstrate the differences. I can see a timeline matrix forming along the lines of wikimatrix and cmsmatrix.

• circavie
• dipity
• xtimeline
• allofme
• lifesnapz

The timeline below is created at dipity.com, it takes feeds from your social sites to create the embeddable iframe below. Nicely done..

Below is a timeline created at xtimeline.com. There is no time range zoom, but social editing is encouraged and there is a discussion attached to each timeline at the website. You can also share and search timelines. This timeline looks much better on the site itself -