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.