Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Online databases

Article: http://www.nwinnovation.com/story/0013397.html

I found this article very interesting. I know several people who keep a "database" (if you can call it that) using Microsoft Excel. I've seen it in action, and it is not very efficient. Blist is targeting these people with an easy-to-use web-based database.

Excel is just not meant to be used as a database. It is really meant to manage numbers. My uncle is a self-employed jeweler, and I remember helping him do inventory for some extra cash when I was younger. The company whose jewelry he was selling had given him an Excel spreadsheet with the ID #s, prices, and quantities of each piece. I had to go through all the jewelry and record the quantities he had into a new column, and then add the prices together to get the total value of his inventory. Excel was useful for this purpose because I could easily plug in the numbers, then use Excel's sum and multiplication functions to do the math for me in a matter of seconds.

But for people who say, keep a spreadsheet of their movie or comic book collection, Blist will great for them. Microsoft Access can be intimidating or confusing for non-technical people, which is why they use Excel. But web applications are generally made to be very user-friendly. They can also be more secure. I know several people who are not computer-savvy at all, and the words "maintenance," "firewall," and "security" mean nothing to them. Their computers end up having all sorts of problems or their hard drives crash and they lose all their data. For people like this, maintaining an online database is great because if the computer goes, at least all the hard work they put into their database isn't lost.

For people who like to mail around their "spreadsheet databases," everytime they make a change they have to resend it to everyone. If they don't, all the recipients will have outdated or inaccurate information. But you can share a link to your online database and no matter how many changes you make to your information, the link will still be the same. That means a recipient of the link can visit the database whenever they want and see the lastest information you've posted. That leaves the recipients with more accurate data and more mailbox space, and more time for the database creator (now that they are sending less email).

I have already signed up to be notified when the Blist beta releases. I think it is a great idea that will surely become a hit in the web community.

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