You know what would be cool in spaces? Better lists!

When I first saw Spaces, it looked like a lighter SharePoint.  When I added my blog, it looked a lot like a SharePoint blog.  When I added bookstream, it was a list of books.  It looked like a SharePoint list.  I assumed right then that it was possible to add SharePoint lists, that SharePoint technology must be under the covers on Spaces.

 

Nope.  I just tried to add a custom list.  By custom, I mean one where I get to add some columns, pick the data types, etc.  You can add a custom list but the columns are pre-determined.  So, this is nice but not nice enough.  It’s nice that I can have a list of, say, favorite wines or restaurants or whatever but basically the lists are generic and therefore somewhat limited.

 

What would be cool would be if we could add lists and set the column types in Spaces, like we can in SharePoint.  The types of columns in my imagined feature would be a little different from SharePoint.  For example, Spaces does not need a barcode column type like we have in SharePoint.  It would be nice to be able to have a list column that is set based on the contents of another list.  That would be nice.

 

Here’s a column I’d like: image, meaning the value of the column is a pointer to an image in one of my albums (or on the internet, maybe).  Obviously, the display of the item in the list or in details would be to show the photo.

 

Here’s another column I’d like: map.  In this case, the item is a Bing map showing some point.  Let’s say I want to have a list of my favorite restaurants, it would be awesome for a spaces app on my mobile device to allow me to pass my current location to bing and then store that in my Map column.  Then when people looked at my list, they’d see the location of the place.  You could do the same with photo journals.  I could start adding the location of the sign images I’ve been blogging.

 

Instead of the SharePoint user column, we could add a column for a person in my network.

 

You get the picture.  I can start to build my own little collaborative social apps in my space.

 

There may be good reasons this is not availalble.  "Too complicated and geeky" could be one reason.  Another could be that it does not scale.  However, now the reason can no longer be that nobody thought of it or wrote it down because I just did.