Early Friday morning, I flipped the switch on Elistic, my idea for a social list manager come to life. The concept was born from a combination of my desire for a good organizer for my Getting Things Done lists and my interest in social networking tools like del.icio.us. The current product is the result of several commutes’ worth of hacking and is still very much in its infancy. I hope to continue developing Elistic in response to the ways in which people want to use it.

Elistic gives you the ability to create lists containing any type of text content, organizing them using a free-form tagging system, and “linking” your entries to other users’ entries as you see fit. Elistic offers RSS feeds for all of its hosted content, and I’m working on an XML API similar to that offered by del.icio.us to encourage creative development of extensions.

It’s a pretty simple system, but I believe that it creates the potential for rich social interaction — one could conceivably use Elistic to host a blog, or a discussion group, or a communal mind map… It would thrill me to see people eventually using it in ways that I had never considered. I hope you’ll check it out and tell me what you think!

There are a couple reasons why I waited until now to start telling people about it. Most interestingly, I wanted to perform an experiment to see how effective del.icio.us would be as the sole promotion tool. Friday morning, I added Elistic as a del.icio.us bookmark and tagged it with a few values that I thought were appropriate.

Within a short while, the bookmark had been picked up by a few more people, and people were starting to sign up at Elistic. By the end of the day, Elistic had about 50 unique visitors, and about 200 more throughout Saturday, all from one link on del.icio.us. Of those 250, ten people created an account and started experimenting with it.

I don’t know that this proves anything other than del.icio.us is a success as a useful social bookmarking tool. Not that I didn’t know that already, but it’s fun to see it in action, anyway.

The other reason that I kept quiet for a couple days was becuase I wanted a chance to start nice and quietly to make sure things were working. I have already found and fixed a couple minor problems thanks to the interest of one particular user. But it seems like things are running more ore less smoothly, so if it sounds interesting, why don’t you check it out? I’d love to hear what you think I can do to make Elistic a more interesting and useful service.