The Diddit Basics
Diddit collects experiences across a wide variety of categories: whether you’ve ate at a particular restaurant, visited a certain location or tried a particular sport, you can check off those adventures off your Diddit list. While that seems like a very basic site idea — and perhaps not particularly appealing for people of a certain mindset — there are layers to using the site that can make Diddit worth the visit.
One of the features of Diddit is the ability to network with your friends. Importing a set of friends from another system is relatively easy and you can create lists of things you’ve done — and would recommend for a specific friend — and pass them along. For instance, there are several road trip lists that follow an interstate or highway across the country, pointing out the best stops and side trips.
Most items on your lists will be one word: a popular list of animals seen includes 242 animal names. But you aren’t limited to that simple title. You can photos and stories to give a bigger picture of the experiences you share on Diddit. You can do the same on other people’s lists. You can suggest items to add to a particular list, along with your own adventures.
The Other People on Diddit
Those pictures and stories shared on Diddit are an opportunity for anyone interested in finding new things to do. By digging around in the ‘Food & Drink’ category, you can find lists of restaurants in your area to try out. You can find new things to do in just about every other category, too: no matter what area your passion falls into, the odds are pretty good that you’ll find something new to do.
When it comes to planning out the trips I want to take, or the other goals I have outside of work, I sometimes find myself at a loss for where I should head next. Just browsing through the things that other people have posted to Diddit, though, has started me thinking about a whole list of things I want to do in the future. Diddit has made it easy to keep track of all those incoming ideas, too: if you come across something on the site that someone else has done, you can mark it ‘wanna do it.’ Diddit compiles all of items you mark as such into one big ‘wanna do’ list.
So far, there are over 300,000 different activities in Diddit’s database. It isn’t just user-generated, either: Diddit has generated lists and activity descriptions by crawling the web. That’s definitely a benefit to a relatively new site. Diddit won’t need to work up to a level of critical mass in order to be useful for its users.
Even if you’re one of those people who can never find anything to do, you might just manage to come across something awesome just by browsing through all the options. Ludic Labs — the company that created Diddit — has stated on its website that “There is a 100% chance that you will find something to do at Diddit.com.” That’s a pretty big promise, but Ludic Labs seems to manage it. Much of Ludic Labs’ staff seems to have come directly from Inktomi, a company which was acquired by Yahoo in 2002.
Even after only spending a little time on Diddit, I’ve found it addictive. I want to mark off more things that I’ve done, create my own lists and go hunting for new things to do. I’ve even got a list of new foods I want to try — I plan to add a couple of them to my shopping cart during my next trip to the grocery store so that I can move them from ‘wanna do’ to diddit. To a certain extent, I think it’s also possible to use Diddit to rate certain activities, like visiting a particular restaurant or hiking a particular trail. However, the wide variety of experiences that Diddit catalogs isn’t quite ideal as a directory to rely on for specific restaurant recommendations. For those nights when you just want to try a new place, though, Diddit can narrow down your options fast.
Creating a Diddit Account
Accounts on Diddit are free and take only a moment to set up. You can spend as little or as much time filling out a Diddit profile as you want: I haven’t seen many profiles with tons of information, though. Instead, the real information is in the lists you choose to share and the adventures you can check off on your own Diddit list. You can also give and receive ‘toasts’ — comments and compliments shared between Diddit users. I haven’t quite figured out why they’re called toasts (rather than comments), but it does offer a way to comment and even ask questions on the adventures you might want to take in the future.
If you have a Diddit account, let us know how you’re enjoying the site in the comments. Got a favorite list? Please share it!
