Socrata

We’ve found that a lot of people are using blist to keep track of things related to their church: things like church directories, church finances, and just generally the usual things that an organization needs to organize.

The First Baptist Church of O’Fallon, Illinois has been using blist for a few things. Here is FBC Youth Ministry Assistant, Rachel Blankenship in her own words:

“We have been using blist pretty actively in the Youth Department here at First Baptist.  blist has been useful to us in event planning. We like blist because it keeps us all connected.  We can share it easily with people in and out of the office and the information is easy to read.  I also like the viewer/contributor feature. Generally, we use blist for event planning.  We have youth events that require tracking on those signed up.  I make lists of all our students and track their money, forms and other information.  I am currently using blist to Budget for an upcoming event.  We are also looking to use blist to do attendance for an off-campus Bible Study so that the attendance can be done from a computer during the Study. Before blist, we were using Excel and Access.”

We’d be honored if you gave blist a try too: www.blist.com

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.

Earlier this week Yammer won best-in-show at TechCrunch 50.

Yammer is important and I want to tell you why.

Tell me, what do you know as a starting point? You know what the phone is, what voice mail is, what email is, right? OK, good. You know what IM and texting are, right? Kinda sorta but not really. OK, let me remind you. Instant messaging – IM for short – is a way for you and me to type messages to each other in real time. Early on their were private networks, most notably ICG and AOL Instant Messenger, where we both had to be on the same network to type messages to each other. As a result, many of us opened free accounts on AIM, MSN and Yahoo! Two of the shortcomings of IM are that If you’re offline I can’t IM you andIf I’m offline, you can’t IM me. And you can tell if I’m online, so I can’t hide from you when you really want to reach me.

Texting is like IM, but instead of a computer you use a cell phone. It’s so bad only teenage girls use it. (kidding)

Twitter is like broadcast IM, limited to 140 characters – about a sentence and a half. The only people who see your broadcast twitter messages (called tweets) are those who elect to follow you. The tweets are so short, they are officially called status updates. There’s only enough room to provide an update about your status to the people who follow you. Examples might be “Working on the version 2.3 of the latest release of software” or “At FX McRory’s for happy hour with some of the team – drop by if you’re in the area.”

I started using twitter a couple of months ago and find it useful and valuable. Several of us at blist use twitter and follow each other. Often twitter is the most effecient way to broadcast a message such as “build number 2944a is on staging and ready to test.” But there’s a problem. We would never post that because that’s not a message we want to share outside the team.

That’s where Yammer comes in. Quite simply, Yammer is a private, all employee opt-in chat line. It replaces the times when you really want to send a message to all employees but you really don’t want to send it to the all_employees@mycompany.com email distribution list. Most of us weigh the seriousness of sending an email to everyone in the company. “Will the inconsiderate dolt who left his tuna sandwich in the fridge all weekend please throw it away as soon as possible?”

There are a few reasons that email is the wrong medium for some of these lightweight messages. Most significantly is that the one guy or gal you intend to reach benefits, but everyone else has the chance of being annoyed and losing productivity.  The all_employees@ email list is typically maintained by I.T. or whomever manages your email server. You can’t control whether you’re included in the list, so you get all of the emails.

Yammer is like an opt-in version of all_employees@mycompany.com. It’s like undirected group chat, but within only within the company. The beauty of this communication system is that it works as long as some people listen. As long as a few people get the message, they’ll spread it – either verbally or by other means.

Companies are becoming more and more virtual. I know of a few highly productive companies that are entirely virtual – they don’t have an office. The biggest downside to that model is lack of proximity to your colleagues when you want to bounce ideas off them. Yammer can really help here as it’s “always on” and not nearly as much an interruption as IM. With twitter, and I assume it will be the same with Yammer, there’s no expectation of a response. I only respond if what you said matters to me and I have the bandwidth and appetite to respond. If you ask “Anyone know the equivalent of [Windows]-D to see your desktop on a Mac?” and I don’t know, I’ll just ignore it. But if you IM me and ask the same, I kind of feel obligated to help you.

Technologists like to think of new technologies replacing old, but communication doesn’t work that way. New communication modes usually augment – they don’t replace – existing ones. The more ways we have to communicate, the better. Here’s how I do/would use all of these communication avenues:

*) F2F (face-to-face): When the most important outcome is nurturing the relationship itself.

*) V2V (voice-to-voice): When F2F is not possible and we’re going to talk about something I think we’ll disagree on or which I think might make you uncomfortable and I think hearing your intonation will help me better understand how you really feel.

*) Voice Mail: I don’t use voice mail anymore. If I want to talk to someone V2V and I call and get their voice mail, I’ll usually hang up and send a short email telling them that I’d like to set up a time to have a call – and give them a little context.

*) email: When I want to send a directed, asynchronous message and give you the time to think about it, process it and give me your feedback.

*) blog: When I want to share my lengthier thoughts with an audience that has elected to hear my thoughts. The people who subscribe to the blog are company insiders, outsiders, fans of our software, other entrepreneurs, prospective employees, etc.

*) IM: When I want to send a directed, synchronous message and timeliness of your response is more important than the depth of your response.

*) Group Chat: When 3 or more of us need to have a real-time discussion about a topic. Note that I use group chat in both impromptu and scheduled ways. “Let’s meet Thursday at 3:00 in a group chat session to discuss the API spec.”

*) Yammer: When I want to send a quick private update, which probably is time sensitive, to the entire team hoping that at least a few will respond.

*) SMS (Texting): I only use texting in two circumstances and only with people who have previously texted me. I’ll use it for real-time status updates for time sensitive appointments. For example, if I’m meeting someone for lunch I might text them to tell them “parking now. See you in 5 mins”. I also use text to keep up to date with my teenage daughters and wife. They seem to prefer this mode of communication and that’s reason enough for me to embrace it casually.

*) Twitter: When I want to send a quick status update or brief observation to anyone who cares – inside or out the company.

People are justifiably agonizing about information and communication overload. But that’s why I’m optimistic about Yammer. I think it has a terrific opportunity to eliminate a lot of email and IM that goes on today, simply because there’s no better lightweight means of communication.

By the way, if you aren’t already, I’d love for you to subscribe to this blog via RSS or get it delivered by email and/or follow me on twitter.

What do you think about Yammer? Let me know in comments.

Since our beta launch earlier this year blist has had a gorgeous black and chrome, glassy skin which has generally been lauded upon first look. To refresh your memory, blist currently looks like this:

Come late Monday morning Seattle time we’ll push out the new look and feel of blist. Other than the obvious color change from black to gray, it’s hard to recognize the changes simply by comparing two screen grabs. Say hello to the new look of blist:

What’s less obvious than the color change are a few subtle but much more important changes:

*) The font size is larger

*) The rows in the grid are taller

*) There’s more white space within cells, around the data you enter

The motive for these changes was pure and simple usability. Our usability research showed that the black theme, smaller font and absence of adequate white space around text resulted in insufficient contrast, leading to eye strain over time. Yikes. Our software was causing fatigue!

By redesigning the look and feel we’ve inverted the focus from our application’s “chrome” to your data. And that’s a good thing. Your data tells a story and hopefully by diminishing the focus on the app that story will be easier to hear.

We’ll continue to streamline the interface and continue to focus on usability. We’re convinced that the democratization of working with data begins with the user experience.

Give the new skin a try and let us know what you think.

I’ll be in the San Francisco bay area Thursday and Friday for the Office 2.0 conference – my first time attending this event focusing on web 2.0 software for business. It should be a lot of fun. I’ll be on the GTD panel with Mr. GTD himself David Allen, as well as Doreen Hartzell of Enleiten and Neil Mendelson of MindJet. After my panel engagement is over, I’m looking forward to meeting some smart people from some really fantastic companies.  The roster is pretty impressive – here are just a few of the names that caught my attention:

Loic Lemeur of Seesmic/Twhirl

Aaron Forth of mint.com

Vance Checketts of Mozy (EMC)

Mitch Grasso of SlideRocket – if you haven’t seen Mitch give a demo, don’t miss it!

Jim Groff of PBWiki

Sam Lawrence of Jive Software

Andreas Weigand (was Amazon’s first CTO)

Zoli Erdos of the blog by the same name

If you are in San Francisco late this week, you should plan to attend Office 2.0. It looks like it’s going to be a great event.  And if you do, be sure to introduce yourself.

I love a good run.

Summer’s great, but it’s hard to keep a schedule. The kids are out of school. Vacations interrupt our week-in-and-week-out routines. It’s hard to keep a predictable running regimen.

Fall is great for getting back into a rhythm. Community 5K runs are a quadruple treat: 1) they motivate me (and they’ll motivate you too) to run on my own between events; 2) they’re a lot of fun; 3) they almost always benefit a good cause; and 4) they almost always give you a t-shirt and lots of other fun shwag just for joining in the festivities.

If you’re in the Seattle area, here’s a blist of upcoming runs. This little “widget” is read only, but I’ve made the underlying blist publicly modifiable. Feel free to add other runs in your area. Just click on the [Full Screen] icon at the bottom to open it up in blist.

I look forward to seeing you on the trails and roads around Seattle or hearing about the runs in your area.