Earlier today we released an update to blist. This post outlines some of the enhancements.

You may have noticed that we’ve slowed down from the frenetic pace of feature releases. That was deliberate and in response to user feedback. People were telling us that the basic feature set was rich enough but that there were a number of bugs and some performance issues that slowed them down. As such, we’ve been focusing on stability and performance for a while and those efforts are bearing fruit. We think you’ll find blist to be much less buggy and feeling a lot less like a beta application.

As for performance, blist is much faster in the two areas where it was too slow before - horizontal scrolling and blist-in-a-blist (a table inside a cell). Any of you who have created blists with more than 6 or 7 columns or with a blist-in-a-blist felt some real sluggishness and pain before. Not any more. Both of those areas are really fast now. Go ahead. Try it for yourself. We’re not talking about marginal improvements. We’re talking about a very significant and noticeable boost in performance.

blist is the world’s first (and so far only) social database. That means that we want to make it easy to discover, share, publish and distribute data and data structures. As such, we continue to polish and evolve two of the most social features of blist - Discovery and the Dashboard.

For Discovery we’ve added the blist leader board, which shows who the most social blist users are. Want to be a leader? Be more open and transparent. Create more public blists. Create more public lenses. Sharing semi-private blists boosts your communal index a little. Because the structure (not the data) of every blist is publicly discoverable, even the simple act of creating a private blist boosts your community activity index a little. Go ahead. Game the leader board. Create and share blists like mad and see yourself climb like Tiger Woods on the back 9 at Augusta.

The Dashboard’s enhancements are more subtle - we’re showing more events and we now let you scroll through the most recent 100 events. We’ve also enhanced the flyouts - which give you a thumbnail overview of a user whose event on the dashboard interests you.

Finally, we’re pleased to announce native Excel import. Previously you could import data from Excel only by first saving your data as CSV file. Now you can skip that interim step and import native Excel (XLS) files directly into blist. Making things easier is a big goal.

Check out the latest blist update and let me know what you think.

Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

One of blist’s most powerful features is Discovery, which lets you create a new blist by using someone else’s blist as a starting point. I have a guest post over on FlowingData today, describing what Discovery is, and the thinking behind making everyone’s blists discoverable by others.

Check out the post and while you’re there, stick around and check out some of the other great posts. If you love data and the analysis thereof, you’ll love this blog.

Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Congratulations to Tony Wright, co-founder of RescueTime for being my first follower on Twitter. I know Tony and know he’s here in Seattle, so Tony come on by to pick out your blist t-shirt. We’ve got long sleeve or short and two versions - hi fidelity color logo or monochromatic white logo on black fabric for those special occasions.

For those who don’t know, RescueTime is a Y Combinator startup offering “ridiculously easy time management & analytics.” I encourage you to check them out.

Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

I contemplate a lot of things before jumping in. Contrary to the perceptions and stereotypes of entrepreneurs, I’m not all that impulsive.

I’ve thought about Twitter for a while and honestly can’t decide if it’s going to be a gargantuan time drain or if it’s going to be a way to communicate effectively. When I can’t figure something out, I run an experiment. So that’s how I’m going to treat Twitter for now. Unlike blogging, to which I am 100% committed, please treat my current Twitter status as experimental. You’ll be the first to know when my status changes.

So if you’re interested in micro updates on what’s going on at blist, in the Seattle tech sector or with Kevin Merritt, follow me on Twitter. The first person to follow me on Twitter gets a free blist t-shirt. (Sorry but blist employees and members of my family may follow me, but you are ineligible for the free shirt). For those who don’t know, we hardly ever give away our t-shirts - we like them being scarce and we’ve heard great stories of people asking “where did you get that blist t-shirt?”

You might wonder whom I’ve followed on Twitter so far. Well, I won’t give you the full scoop, but I will share that the first person I followed is Loic le Meur, the CEO of Seesmic.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

For the last few weeks we’ve been busy growing the team and making some enhancements to blist. I’ll use this post to provide a quick update.

Earlier this week Mark joined the team as director of user experience. Until now we had relied on a few visual and interaction design consultants to help put a face on blist and they’ve done a great job. One of our goals is to democratize working with data in large part through breakthrough innovations in usability. It’s precarious to indefinitely rely on consultants for a function that we consider a core competency and key differentiator. From day one we’d wanted this critical function in house and we’re thrilled to have Mark aboard. It’s ironic, because we tried to hire Mark a year ago but I couldn’t articulate the vision well enough at that time to pique his interest. Throughout the year we’ve kept in casual contact and were finally able to bring him in. Mark holds a masters degree in design interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelors in environmental design and architecture from the University of Colorado. I’m thrilled to have him on the team and hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to the team.

Over the last three or four weeks we’ve slowed new feature development in order to focus on improving stability, boosting performance, polishing existing features and making the first use experience of the application more enjoyable and positive. We’re pretty happy with the progress to date on all four of these fronts, but we’ll continue to focus in these areas for another week or two.

For the first use experience, we’ve been working on providing more guidance to get new users up and running quickly. For example, we’ve created a video on creating your first blist, written a getting started topic guide and added a “Getting Started” section to the blist dashboard, which is now the home page when blist starts.

These are really fun times at blist. The team is growing via the addition of a handful of remarkable people. The application continues to evolve. It’s incredibly fulfilling to see the interesting and productive ways in which people are using blist.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Last night Paul & I went to a talk at Google’s Fremont (Seattle) campus on the future of cloud computing. It was a great talk about Google’s core technology assets - GFS, MapReduce and BigTable - and the open source re-implementations of those same technologies - Hadoop and Hbase. Aaron Kimball, UW computer science grad student and founder of Spinnaker Labs, gave a great presentation that was well attended by 100 or so folks who are interested in Internet scale computing.

It was a good, high level overview, which stimulated some good questions and discussion. Among the more interesting things I noted last night include:

*) The optimal profile for a server in a compute farm doesn’t require a lot of top speed CPUs nor should it be packed with RAM. The bottleneck is getting the data from the disk. A 2.4 Ghz 1U server with 4 CPU cores, 4-8 GB of RAM and 2 SATA disk drives (as fast and big as possible) is best.

*) There was some discussion about the performance delta between Hadoop and Google’s technologies. A great point was made that in the long term grand scheme of things, the delta is irrelevant. MapReduce represents a paradigm shift as signficant as the shift to client/server programming 2 decades ago. This approach is likely to be the norm for batch processing of very large data sets for 20 or 30 years to come.

*) The time and overhead of starting up a MapReduce job means that it really is inappropriate for processing datasets under 20 GB.

*) Cycles and bytes, not hardware, are the new commodity.

*) As more technology companies like Amazon and Google provide temporal, on demand access to large compute farms it has the effect of democratizing distributed computing.

*) Hadoop has stabilized significantly over the last year. Hbase needs another 6 months to reach the same level of maturity and stability.

*) There was some minor disagreement about whether virtualization is a foundational prerequisite for cloud computing. In an Amazon Web Services model where different external customers are commissioning and decommissioning servers often, virtualization is mandatory. In the case of internally consumed Internet scale compute farms like the ones Yahoo and Microsoft use exclusively for their own needs, virtualization isn’t a prerequisite.

*) Aaron characterized how SmugMug is building their business on Amazon Web Services. He made an interesting observation that SmugMug has effectively become a value added reseller of S3.

Thanks to Aaron for conducting this talk and to Google for hosting it. As you would expect for Google, there was a great spread of appetizers, beer and wine for the event. It was personally surprising and rewarding to see Aaron highlight blist in one his slides. Aaron was making a case for the web replacing the desktop and pointed to GMail, facebook, Google Apps, meebo, flickr and blist as examples. Hey, I can’t complain about keeping company with this group of innovators.

Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

I admit to being a little over the top about the observance of traditions. I try to find mundane events that can evolve into traditions. My kids think I make the routine ceremonial. Getting a haircut is a big deal at my house. We buy our Christmas tree from exactly the same Christmas tree lot every year. There will be warm orange rolls for breakfast and little smokies for half-time on opening day of the football season.

Yesterday was Paul’s one year anniversary at blist. He brought in a pound of fudge to share. He says he’s starting a new tradition at blist. Each year on your anniversary you need to bring in a pound of chocolate times the number of years you’ve been working at blist. A startup has much in common with a family. You learn a lot about each other. I’m learning that Paul is as geeky about tradition as I am.

Paul’s first year at blist has been phenomenal. He’s a major contributor to both the above-the-surface part of the blist application you see and the below-the-surface infrastructure you don’t. He’s an incredibly diverse software engineer, working all over the stack. Paul is a big picture, long term thinker, which we appreciate. Some software engineers are afraid of hardware and systems administration. Not Paul. He’s physically touched virtually every piece of gear we have and he keeps all of our systems humming. Paul’s been instrumental in building the team by keeping the hiring bar high and genuinely doing a great job of identifying people who can make big, meaningful contributions. blist would be no where as far along today if Paul hadn’t left Microsoft to join us.

So thanks for a terrific first year Paul. This is just the beginning.

I do think if Paul succeeds at spreading the pound of chocolate tradition among all employees, we’ll be incorporating yet another new tradition at blist - the weekly Saturday morning 5K to keep in shape.

startup work environment, startup anecdotes | No Comments »

Matt & I are back in the office after spending most of the week in San Francisco at Web 2.0 Expo last week. The show was interesting. Lots of extravagance and an interesting mix of people walking through the exhibit halls. We made a point to ask what brings people to the conference. Here’s a random assortment of why people came to the show and who dropped by our booth for a demo and visit:

1) Lots of people seem to be suffering from information overload throughout the year, fall behind on keeping up with what’s going on, and then use an event like Web 2.0 Expo to catch up over the course of a few days.

2) A lot of business development folks were wandering around, talking up the capabilities of their respective companies. In hindsight and depending on your company’s goals and objectives, I think this is the best ROI for attending a show like Web 2.0 Expo. If a primary goal is to establish relationships with potential partners, I think walking the exhibit halls is more effective than having a booth.

3) A handful of VCs and investment bankers came by to introduce themselves.

4) I was surprised by more than a few job seekers stopping by. Maybe there are cheap tickets to be found, but it seems a little pricey to pay for a ticket to Web 2.0 to walk around and look for a job.

5) Bill Lucchini and Alex Chriss of Quickbase stopped by for a demo of blist. Usually legacy incumbents discount and ignore the up and coming startups, so it was nice to be on their radar and that they made a deliberate effort to come check us out.

What was most interesting to me, however, is how many “web 2.0″ companies were not there. Where were Facebook, imeem, Scribd, meebo, iLike, Mig33, slide, Twitter, Mint, Mahalo, Xobni, TripIt, et al? The widespread absence of these early stage companies made it feel more like an enterprise software trade show than a web 2.0 “unconference.”

There were far more enterprise and web 1.0 companies than web 2.0 startups. Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon, Yahoo, Rearden Commerce, ABC, Rackspace, NetApp, AOL, Intel, Nokia, Novell and F5 Networks were all there. The handful of web 2.0 startups I remember include Sprout, Triggit, Morfix, LongJump, Mashery, Photobucket (although now part of Fox Interactive Media/MySpace). Also present were a few tweeners - companies I wouldn’t categorize as either legacy/1.0 or web 2.0. These are the “pick and ax” companies of the Internet creating software and services to allow enterprises as well as web 1.0 and web 2.0 companies to do their thing - Amazon Web Services, Atlassian Software, Jive Software, StrikeIron, Kapow, MindTouch and JackBe.

Web 2.0 Expo was an interesting event. We met lots of smart people and continued to spread the good word about the work we’re doing at blist. If we had it to do over again, instead of renting a full 8×10 (or bigger) booth, we’d either simply go as attendees or at most sign up for one of the modest kiosks in the Long Tail Pavilion. Because it was densely populated with a number of cool startups, the Long Tail Pavilion drew great traffic and it was half the price of our traditional booth.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

We all know that the three most important determinants influencing the value of homes are location, location and location. Well it’s true of all real estate, including space on the trade show floor. We moved our booth at Web 2.0 Expo early this morning to a middle aisle with more foot traffic, based on our observations from yesterday. When we selected our booth initially, it wasn’t obvious from the floor plan that our booth faced a wall. We thought it faced “in” to the show, which is what the booths on the opposite perimeter do as well. We had a number of booths to choose from and what looked like bad booths because they were at the back, ended up being good ones because they were along the lunch/break/rest area where a lot of people congregate.

Now we’re in a middle aisle, near our friends from Sprout and across the aisle from Atlassian Software. I think the takeaway for people considering exhibiting at a trade show is to call the coordinator and try to get a feel for what the floor plan doesn’t convey. Ask questions. “Which direction will this booth face?” “Where is the lunch area?”

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Matt & I are at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Like many of you, I lived through the first Internet bubble. One seminal learning that impacted me in a positive way during the first boom was buying a few aeron chairs for my home at an auction selling off Corio’s assets. Their offices were spectacular. They had hundreds of aeron chairs still in plastic wrap, never having been sat in.

I’m sensing a similarly concerning indulgent attitude at Web 2.0 Expo. We bought a used scaffolding and updated the artwork for our first trade show booth. It’s fine. It fits us. Second hand it still cost us about $4,000. That’s a lot of money. We also save a little money by forgoing the $1,200 Internet connection in our booth. We can run blist on our laptops and have the ability to conduct a good demonstration of the capabilities of the application. The Web 2.0 Expo organizers charge you for carpet for your 8 x 10 booth. I like the industrial look of the sealed cement floor in our booth.

Candidly I’m not sure if the return on investment will be positive or negative on our trade show booth. I’ll let you know in a few months after we’ve logged some mileage out of it. There are a few companies here at Web 2.0 Expo which have apparently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their booths. I’m pretty up to date and know what many companies, including startups, are up to. But some of these are companies I have never heard of. Last night there were a number of over-the-top parties hosted by other equally unknown startups.

I hope this indulgence is experimental - companies just trying to find their way in the marketing world, learning what works and what doesn’t. I’m hopeful the lavish spending on booths and parties doesn’t reflect a trend reminiscent of 7 or 8 years ago.

Uncategorized | 3 Comments »