Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Change.gov Spikes Interest In Blist

About 15 minutes before Change.gov posted its latest list of transition donors, the folks at Blist.com got a phone call. It seems President-elect Barack Obama's staff had finished uploading its list of thousands of names and had created a widget to display on their site. Expect more traffic than normal. As Blist staffers arrived Monday morning, they manned e-mail accounts and replied to questions from new users who'd stumbled upon the site, which lets anyone post a database and make it searchable to the public for free. Others kept watch on the servers. "It is certainly a nice spike," said Jon Byrum, senior product manager at Blist. "Our servers have been able to handle it without a problem so far."

Obama's Web team might have newfound power to anoint aspiring technologies just by using them. For Blist -- which is still in beta testing, having launched only last February -- it's hard to imagine a better promotional vehicle. Just in the last day, the site was mentioned by dozens of blogs. Still, the leaders of Change.gov want to avoid appearing to endorse any product and would not comment on why they selected Blist, which has several competitors. The Obama team first contacted Blist a week earlier with questions about whether the Blist system could be revised so users could be warned if they left Change.gov while using the widget's features. The government requires the notice, and the president's team would like to use Blist's service, the company was told. Of course, Blist was happy to oblige.

Obama's Web team posted earlier donor lists, but they had been built using basic HTML and weren't searchable or sortable. So Monday's batch was essentially outsourced to the Seattle firm. "There is something to be said for the government working with smaller businesses and working with the tool that is best focused on the task at hand," Byrum said. "Sure, they could go and try to create that, but you have to question whether that's a really great use of government resources."

Chris Metcalf, a technical program manager for Blist, credits government entities such as the U.S. Census Bureau for posting a lot of valuable data, but he said third-party specialists like Blist are better at making the data sharable and "more social." Blist isn't getting anything in return for its service, which is free to use. It's not even making money from advertisements around the data. But that's temporary. The free version of Blist will soon be ad-supported, and a new premium service will require a monthly fee. The details are still being worked out. For now, Metcalf is thankful for the "congratulations" from friends and family that he got all day long via instant messages and Twitter.

Said Byrum: "It's just really validating for all the work we are doing." -- Lucas Grindley