The Ditto Blog

Last year, our team joined Groupon to help local communities and the small businesses they depend on thrive. In following months, we teamed up with other acquired entrepreneurs at Groupon and started a new, growing business inside our parent company.

This week marked the launch of the solution we’ve worked so hard to create: Breadcrumb by Groupon, a suite of iPad point of sale and mobile payments apps with really low processing rates for local businesses. It’s exciting to see it out in the wild!

Read more about it in my announcement on the Breadcrumb blog.

Jyri

As previously announced, Ditto has been removed from the App Store and Nokia Store today*. If you are currently using Ditto on your iPhone or Nokia device, you will be automatically logged out in the next 24 hours. You can then delete the app from your device.

Thanks everyone for being a part of our journey!
The Ditto.me team

* It may take up to 24 hours for the app to be removed globally.

We’re happy to announce that Groupon has acquired Ditto.me!

We started Ditto a year ago to make it really simple and fun to discover new restaurants, movies, and things to do using your phone. Behind it there’s an idea about changing the world.

Our friend runs a tea shop by our office in Hayes Valley, San Francisco. There’s a bookshop, a coffee kiosk, a yoga studio and an arts and crafts shop. The people who go there get to know each other. There’s a community.

We’re joining Groupon to help communities like Hayes Valley thrive everywhere.

When we talked to our friends at Groupon, we were impressed. They are about creating that world, too. So we’re going to do it together.

We can’t reveal what we’ll be working on at Groupon but we are excited to give it 100% – to enable this, we’ll be winding down Ditto. On April 30th we’ll switch off the service and remove the app from Apple’s and Nokia’s stores*. We think you’ll love what we and Groupon dream up next.

Thanks for believing in us! And stay tuned. The journey’s just starting.

* If you are using Ditto and would like to keep an archive of your posts, email us at support@ditto.me and we’ll get you sorted.

Nokia users can now Ditto!

Now, Nokia fans can join in with their iPhone using friends, and get Dittoing: see when they’re looking for a friend to join them for coffee, what movie they’re going to see, and what their evening plans are.

Our developers have been working with the folks at Nokia to put together a special version of the app, so that the Nokia faithful don’t get left out in the cold.

You can download it here

So, Nokia fans… we’re all looking forward to having you on board! See you on Ditto!

On July the 14th, at 5pm (Pacific Coast Time) Ditto will be offline for a short period, as we undergo some maintenance work on our back end systems.

Based on past experience, we expect this to be on the order of 30-40 minutes in duration, but these things can never be guaranteed. For updates, either keep an eye on this post, or follow @dittoapp.

Thanks for understanding!

I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone, that here at Ditto HQ, there’s an ongoing conversation about what how Ditto is used.

Nick, one of our dev team, broke Ditto usage down into three main motivations.

1. Recognition. We want to be acknowledged. Â We want people to know us, to see what we’re doing and saying. We like it when people validate us as individuals and say “hey, that’s a great restaurant” or “I’d love to hear your opinion of that!”.

2. Recommendation. Â We use Ditto to see where we should go, what we should do, to find out what’s nearby that people from our network of contacts have liked. Â Recommendations from people we know have more meaning than the equivalent from complete strangers.

3. Participation. If we announce that we’re at a particular location, or going to see a certain movie, we’re opening ourselves up to people saying ‘Can I come too?’. Â We’re letting people know where we are (“I’m in the city…”), what we feel like doing (“… and I need a beer”), and we’re hoping that someone we know might want to come along and join in (because, really, who likes to drink alone?). Maybe it’s participation in an event, an outing, or simply a conversation on Ditto – it’s all about getting people doing stuff together.

We’re working to make Ditto more useful to more people in all these ways – we want you to get more out of Ditto.

Are you using Ditto in a way thats not covered by these three? Â We’d love to hear about it!

Announcing, Ditto 1.2, now available for download from the App Store!

New features include:

• Facebook single sign-on so you (mostly) no longer need to enter your username and password.
• Improved geolocation, for more reliable and accurate location reporting.
• Ditto now runs on iOS 4.0, providing more support for older and not updated devices
• New icons/subcategories including Italian and French cuisine, taking a tram, riding a motorcycle, and playing golf.

So, for an even better Ditto, get yourself to the App Store, and get your Ditto update on!

We’re expanding Ditto from the iPhone to the Web today!

Now, whenever someone syndicates their Ditto post to Twitter or Facebook, a dit.to shortlink will automatically be appended to the post, so folks who aren’t on Ditto can click through to a web version of the thread and join in on the conversation.

Have a look at this tweet by our mobile engineer Ulf Schwekendiek to see an example. Click the dit.to shortlink in the tweet to get to the new web landing page and leave a reply!

We don’t have the full Ditto experience on the web yet – we’re in ongoing development there, and will keep growing this out. For now, we simply wanted our non-iPhone using friends to be able to join in on the conversation when they see a Ditto link on Facebook or Twitter.

On April the 20th, at 5pm PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) Ditto will be offline for a short period, as we undergo some maintenance work on our back end systems.

Based on past experience, we expect this to be on the order of 30-40 minutes in duration, but these things can never be guaranteed. For updates, either keep an eye on this post, or follow @dittoapp.

Thanks for your patience!

Rescheduled! Â New date: Â 3 May 2011, same time.

On April the 5th, at 5pm (Pacific Coast Time) Ditto will be offline for a short period, as we undergo some maintenance work on our back end systems.

Based on past experience, we expect this to be on the order of 30-40 minutes in duration, but these things can never be guaranteed. Â For updates, either keep an eye on this post, or follow @dittoapp.

Thanks for understanding!

[Update] Maintenance completed – we’re back online folks!