Blistful blist!

Hey guys,

I thought I would write about a Seattle startup that is just around the corner from me. I think they have a fantastic idea and I've been telling as many people as I can about it.

The service is called http://www.blist.com/. It bills itself as the easiest database in the world. Think of Microsoft Access with a slick user interface and hosted in the sky. The user experience is strictly Flash and it looks great. To start, you have 3 options for creating a blist (creating one from scratch, importing a file or creat from an existing one).

From there on out, you are basically working with a table in a database. The folks at Blist have created some really thoughtful column types. Amongst the really good ones are:

- Ratings (the list of stars that you can pick)

- Checkboxes (easy way to do a boolean value)

- Documents (they support embedded documents which is really nice).

You can work with your data in one of four views. The default is the table view; the other choices are page view, calendar and chart.

One thing to look out for is that Blists are created by default as being public. That means other Blist users can see your data. That may or may not be what you really want. So far, in my limited use of Blist, I've found I'd rather just keep my data private.

The Blist folks seem really serious about getting customer feedback. I emailed them about a little glitch that I saw and they were very fast in responding. Their product manager was kind enough to grab a coffee with me to discuss my thoughts on their service.

Hosting things in the cloud seems to be all the rage right now. I've been really impressed with how easy Blist is to use. They sound like they have some really interesting features in the pipeline; check them out if you get the chance!

Thanks!

Eric.