Databases disguised as lists

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

There are a number of things that make us human - things like the need for company, our aggression, and our drive to build things. Along with those attributes comes another: The need to keep lists. Of all of modern man's drives, list keeping is one of the most powerful.

Until the personal computer came along we scribbled our lists on bits of paper or in organizers and spent a significant amount of time rewriting, reorganizing, and generally fooling around with bits of paper. Once we had PCs things were much better. But it took the Internet and the Web to really make lists work well.

I’ve covered a few list keeping services in previous issues of the Network World Web Applications Alert such as Jott and Hiveminder and today I have yet another for you: Blist.

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There are a number of things that make us human - things like the need for company, our aggression, and our drive to build things. Along with those attributes comes another: The need to keep lists. Of all of modern man's drives, list keeping is one of the most powerful.

Until the personal computer came along we scribbled our lists on bits of paper or in organizers and spent a significant amount of time rewriting, reorganizing, and generally fooling around with bits of paper. Once we had PCs things were much better. But it took the Internet and the Web to really make lists work well.

I’ve covered a few list keeping services in previous issues of the Network World Web Applications Alert such as Jott and Hiveminder and today I have yet another for you: Blist.

Blist, launched at DEMO ’08 spring and which opened its doors in to the public in March as a beta site, is a Flash-based service which makes creating, managing, and sharing lists very simple and effective.

Actually, Blist is kind of sneaky because what you are creating are really databases. Once you’ve signed up (for free) you can immediately begin creating lists.

If you want to start from scratch you give your list a name, optional description, categorize it, add tags, and set whether the list is to be public or private and what modification rights or not others can have.

If you don’t want to create a list from scratch you can create a Blist list from an Excel spreadsheet or use an existing Blist list as a template. A clever feature in Blist is that you can opt to expose just the fields, but not your data, allowing others to use your Blist list as a template.

You can modify Blist lists whenever you please, and adding fields to Blist lists is (as with almost everything to do with all Blist layout features) a simple drag and drop process. Supported field types include text, number, date and time, photo, money, phone, checkbox, flag, stars, percent, URL, e-mail, document, Boolean, pick list, and blist-in-a-blist (i.e. an embedded Blist list – what is really a database within a database).

Blist lists can be viewed and edited as forms, tables or calendars and you can set up “lenses” (search templates) to create filtered views.

Blist provides publishing via widgets for inclusion in blogs, on Web sites, on Facebook as well as iGoogle, Pageflakes, and NetVibes and you can invite users via Blist’s e-mail service and assign roles (contributors who can edit or viewers who can, er, only view).

What makes Blist so interesting and so ambitious is that while what you’re really doing is building and modifying SQL databases, Blist hides all of the details so you don’t need to know anything about SQL or, indeed, that you are actually using SQL at all.

An API is in the works, and if that is as slick and powerful as the rest of the Blist service, the company will be onto something quite remarkable that should satisfy many people’s primal list-building urges.

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.