Metro Canada - Ottawa, Canada - May 29, 2008
Paul’s Website of the week: www.blist.com — an online database manager. It looks a bit like a spreadsheet but it does a lot more … View Article
Monthly Archive for May, 2008
We’re happy to grow the team again today. Chris Metcalf joins blist as our first Technical Program and Product Manager, or TPPM for short. Chris joins us from Amazon, where he was initially a software engineer, but most recently a TPPM for the last year. Chris earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science engineering from University of Michigan before earning his masters degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
You might wonder what a TPPM does and why blist needs one. In the simplest of explanations, a TPPM makes a development team more productive. A TPPM can boost productivity in a number of ways. By helping iron out and vet issues with management, marketing and/or design before a software engineer sees a task, the TPPM ensures that the task is ready to be coded without delays associated with fleshing out details. A good TPPM can get out ahead of the dev team and spec out solid technical design. For example, one of Chris’ first projects will be mapping out the details of the forthcoming blist API. Because he’s a software engineer by background, Chris will be able to develop sample apps using the API. He’ll be the liason with the developer community after we release the API. The TPPM also leads the effort to integrate blist with external services. For example, Chris will spec out how blist can support OpenId authentication.
At blist, the TPPM is the designated scrum master in our development sprints. The scrum master keeps the development schedule and interfaces with product management, marketing and senior management on overall progress. The TPPM also helps evolve our development environment, from tools to automated build systems.
We’re a data driven business. The TPPM owns our internal stats infrastructure. Want to know how much time each blist user spends on site on average? Want to know how many shared blists the average user has? The TPPM ensures that we’re tracking the analytics through the application and that we have the appropriate tools and reports to be able to understand and distribute the data.
At blist we have very blended lines between marketing, product management and technical program management. As such, the TPPM plays a vital role in setting development priorities.
I for one am elated to have Chris jump in and take a lot of these projects on. Look for our pace to increase as Chris gets up to speed. Chris is also an interesting guy outside of work. He’s a competitive sailor and builds are sorts of neat and useful things. He’s both a GTD geek and an avid do-it-yourselfer. I’m looking forward to having a MacGyver around the office.
Happy Memorial Day. A genuine and sincere thank you to all who gave their lives in defense of freedom.
If you have some time today, I encourage you to research the roots of the song “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Originally written in 1855 by William Steff as a campfire song, this patriotic anthem has motivated many - soldiers in both the union and confederate armies, abolitionists, evangelicals, modern day soldiers and politicians. The lyrics have changed from time to time, with the current version most widely heard today having been written as a poem in 1861 by abolitionist Julia Howe.
Spend some time today poking around the web. Read the articles you find. Listen to the many different renditions. Think about the men and women it inspired. Let it inspire you. Remember those who were inspired by it in defense of the freedom we enjoy.
You may have seen my post that a couple of weeks ago I decided to try twitter. Feel free to follow me at www.twitter.com/kmerritt. My first 10 days or so have been mostly positive, other than the annoyance of the service being down fairly often and the mental distraction of the engineer in me wanting to solve their scaling problems.
Today it was revealed that twitter raised $15M in venture capital. Congratulations to them. Hopefully now they can rebuild their messaging architecture by hiring some people who can solve these kinds of scale problems. It’s a very solvable problem technically. My concern is the time it will take relative to their exponential growth. It’s a real world race condition. Can their current network survive for as long as it takes to build a more scalable one?
In all candor, they should have worked harder to not disclose their funding. Of course the funding itself is going to drive usage at an even faster rate. Why do I have that position? There’s no doubt in my mind that twitter hit a network effect inflection point recently. By that I mean at some point within the last 60 days or so, fence sitters like me observed that the twitter network itself was large enough and growing fast enough that the quality of the network was improving simply by the presence of new people. Linked In hit a similar inflection point 18 months or so ago. I think the only thing holding a lot of people back from using twitter was company viability. Raising money isn’t a business model, but it does buy twitter some time and I think more people will try it now.
There isn’t a requirement to disclose a financing. There’s a very minor risk to investors to not file with the SEC. It only comes into play if you try to go public and have unaccredited outside investors. That seems unlikely assuming twitter has had decent legal counsel. Under the circumstances, I think twitter might have been better served to keep the financing quiet and focus 100% of their energy on stabilizing the platform in part by not exposing it to undue stress. They could always spend 90 or 120 days, fix up their infrastructure, and then come out with a much more meaningful announcement proclaiming both network reliability and a significant financing.
Many of you have commented that you like the dashboard and are enjoying seeing how other people are using blist. Some of you have asked why some of the activities have pictures associated with the person using blist. Those people have updated their blist profile with a photo, image or caricature. So how can you update your blist profile photo?
It’s easy. Just follow these steps.
Step 1: Click on the profile link in the upper right hand corner of blist:
Step 2: Click on the Change picture link in the profile page:
Step 3: Browse around the files on your computer and select the file you want to use as your picture.
Step 4: While you have the profile page open, perhaps you want to update some of the other fields. When you’re done, click [OK] to save your updated profile page.
That’s all there is to it. Your blist profile page has been updated. On the dashboard when somebody hovers their mouse over the thumbnail image, they’ll see your picture.
By uploading your profile picture, you make blist more your own and give others a glimpse into your personality. Would you really want to borrow Alfred E Neuman’s blist as your starting point? What - you worry?
As most people who subscribe to this blog know, blist raised $6.5M from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures earlier this year. While raising money does tend to be picked up and reported on by journalists, it really is a non-event. What matters is what you do with the capital you’ve raised. After all, the existing shareholders wouldn’t accept ownership dilution unless they felt enterprise value would increase over the long term by exchanging some ownership for some working capital.
The most important activity a startup can do with more capital is hire great people who can help accelerate the pace. We’ve maintained a really high hiring bar. I’m thrilled that we’ve kept the bar high but have been able to hire some really key contributors. I mentioned that our first director of user experience joined us a couple of weeks ago. Today marks the start of three back-to-back-to-back weeks of new hires joining us from Amazon. Two of them are mid-career software engineers and the third is a technical program manager who’s also been a software engineer at Amazon. In a couple of weeks we’ll also add our summer first intern - a graduate computer science student from the University of Washington.
As a team, all of us at blist work hard to continue to hire exceptional people. I’m thrilled with the team we’ve assembled and look forward to an incredibly productive summer and remainder of 2008.
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.
Now you can import XLS files straight from Excel into blist without having to save your file in a different format. blist has been able to import CSV files for some time, but now the common task of importing a spreadsheet into blist just got much simpler and easier.
One of blist’s most powerful features is Discovery, which lets you create a new blist by using someone else’s blist as a starting point. I have a guest post over on FlowingData today, describing what Discovery is, and the thinking behind making everyone’s blists discoverable by others.
Check out the post and while you’re there, stick around and check out some of the other great posts. If you love data and the analysis thereof, you’ll love this blog.
Congratulations to Tony Wright, co-founder of RescueTime for being my first follower on Twitter. I know Tony and know he’s here in Seattle, so Tony come on by to pick out your blist t-shirt. We’ve got long sleeve or short and two versions - hi fidelity color logo or monochromatic white logo on black fabric for those special occasions.
For those who don’t know, RescueTime is a Y Combinator startup offering “ridiculously easy time management & analytics.” I encourage you to check them out.
