One of the most fascinating characteristics of software is that it often can be used in unexpected ways. It’s one of the reasons I love being in the software industry today and one of the reasons I loved being a programmer earlier in my career.

Six years ago I founded a company that developed and operated an email archiving service. We captured all of a company’s email and stored it for 3 to 7 years. Typically a company with 100 employees would store about 5GB of email per month. One little company was archiving ten times that amount. We researched and called the company in order to figure it out. One of the administrators in the company’s I.T. department had written a script that located all the changed files on the network, zipped them up, and emailed them to a special internal mailbox. The administrator knew that these emails would be archived by us, offsite, “in the cloud.” It was a creative solution to his problem and one we hadn’t foreseen when we developed the service.

Over the last few days I’ve been emailing back and forth helping a user of blist. He’s setting up an expense tracker to share with his wife and daughter. His daughter is a college freshman and just moved away to live in the dorms. blist is an easy way for them to keep everything centralized.

After we got everything just right in his blist, he emailed me a final quick note of thanks. Without solicitation he shared with me how he first started using blist. The story moved me and I wanted to share it with a larger audience.

The man’s father had recently passed away. The son (our blist user) thought that his dad would want the siblings to decide how to divide the furniture, family keepsakes and heirlooms and other sentimental items. So he created a blist and entered all of the items. He photographed each item and embedded the pictures in a photo column in the blist. He included an empty field for each sibling to fill in their name if they wanted an item. He then used blist’s sharing mechanism to share the blist with his siblings. Though the siblings each live in different parts of the country, they were able to see all of the sentimental items and heirlooms and decide which ones they’d like to have to help remember their dad.

The ways people are using blist never ceases to amaze me. It makes me happy and proud. We’ll share more stories about how people use blist in the near future. When possible, we’ll ask the owner of the blist to let us highlight the blist itself, showing you what it looks like so you can see it for yourself.

If you use blist in an unusual way, we would love to hear about it. Feel free to send me a note. My email address is kevin dot merritt at blist.com.