It’s been three weeks since blist launched in private beta at DEMO. You’ve been busy making blists; we’ve been busy adding features. You may not have noticed but we’ve had three or four releases since DEMO, mostly below the surface bug fixes and streamlining of the account creation process. Today we’re pleased to release some important new features.

By far the most requested feature has been the ability to import data from Excel. Now we have it. When you click on the [New blist] icon, instead of having “Coming Soon” stamped over it, you can now import from CSV. Just give your blist a name, browse for the CSV file and line up the columns with the appropriate column types.

Importing is fairly manual and basic for now. Over time we’ll try to do more by guessing column types and automatically generating pick lists. For now, while we’re still in beta this new feature dramatically improves the process of migrating an existing pseudo-database from Excel into blist.

We also released some very basic sharing capabilities. You can now share a blist or lens with someone else. Just click on the share icon and we’ll send an email invitation to whomever you want to share your blist with. Initially blists and lenses are shared read-only. Don’t worry, pretty soon we’ll add very robust permission-setting capabilities.

We’ve added basic charting capabilities. Load up your blist or lens and click on the chart icon (the one that looks like a pie chart), then select the chart type and X & Y axis and you’ll get something kinda like this:

As for major features, the last new one is simple search across all text columns. When we launched three weeks ago, the simple search box only searched tags. Now it’s scope is much broader (but yes, we know, not broad enough).

The feedback since launch has been terrific. Keep it coming. The message we’ve been hearing is that you like what you see but we still have a ways to go before you can start using blist regularly with your critical data. We agree. This feature release is a small, but important step in the right direction. We’re not only listening, but working hard to meet your needs. Thanks.