Blist becomes Socrata

I don’t think Blist ever made any serious ripples amongst the various web based applications available out there. It was an excel like program with some great visual features, but unlike excel and Google Spreadsheets, the main focus was sharing data. In my opinion, it was very clean and provided a new angle on a tired platform. Afterall, it’s hard to make something like excel look exciting. The only complaint I ever had was I couldn’t figure out how to make a web form submit to the “blist”.

None the less, Blist is no more. Socrata has taken over, with the aim of being a social network for data lovers. I’m assuming Blist didn’t have a sustainable business plan, so they adapted. Who knows, maybe they were hoping for a buyout. None they less, they didn’t pack up and leave. There were some very interesting Blists, so they built a platform that will, hopefully, facilitate the sharing of “data sets” more productively.

The first interesting data set I found covers a handful of venture capital investments. It very well may become an interesting source of information – the type of information that makes writing an article or news story far easier.