krueggen
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2014–2018
6:46 · 10K views · Jul 4, 2007
A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.
Used as a reference for an ahead-of-its-time end-user database tool, brought up in threads on Access clones, Smalltalk and data-entry tools.
5 comments from Hacker News
Uh-oh. Are there any other companies than Whisper System that had an actual end-user product that Twitter has acquired -- and then not killed off? I don't recognize that many from: [LINK] Except for Dabble DB (Smallthought Systems) and Posterous: [LINK] [LINK] I hadn't realize how extra-cruel the dabbledb thing was until I read this: [LINK] "Up until about a year ago, we[twitter] used an online database called Dabble DB to track and share information about our projects internally. While we’ve since moved that project management tool in-house (...)" [In other words: we realize this was a great product, and we still killed it, because, meh profits for twitter?"] For those that didn't know what DabbleDB was: this video So, while an acquisition might be great for the owners of soundcloud, I'm rather terrified as a user...
If you haven't heard of DabbleDB, this video is a good introduction: this video . It shared some goals with Eve, like letting people easily enter and manipulate data, though as far as I know it never tried to support general-purpose programming.
There are quite a few products that attempt to be a web based equivalent of Access. The two that seem to be the closest to me are Google's AppMaker ( [LINK] ) and Bubble.is ( [LINK] ). I call these two out because they both allow for coding when the "default path" runs into a wall, and both include more than just forms and tables. However, they both still have warts. Appmaker, for example, has a pricing model problem. It's $10/user (GSuite), so you can't use it to build anything that involves casual outside users, like an employment applicant tracking system. The next tier down are somewhat similar products that have been around longer. Like Quickbase ( [LINK] ), Caspio ( [LINK] ), Airtable ( [LINK] ), Zoho Creator ( [LINK] ), Rajic ( [LINK] ), and Knack ( [LINK] ). These all work great if the app you're making fits into their somewhat fixed view of the world, but hit a hard wall if it doesn't. Some of them also have the same pricing model problem I mentioned in the preceding paragraph. The one I really thought was going to emerge as the market leader was DabbleDB. Sadly, Twitter acquihired them and shut it down. Here's one of the demo videos: this video It was very ahead of it's time back in 2007.
Sadly they got acqu-hired by twitter - and judging by some (not bad, just in lack of enthusiasm) comments, I got a sense that they sold dabbledb at peak technical/architectural debt... It's a bit sad, I appeared to be a Google sheets meets office 365 flows on steroids before either was any good: this video (i think that's from 2006 or so, archive.org has more info, but it's a bit painful to navigate on mobile) Avi Bryant comments on hn from time to time: [LINK] As I understand it, each customer got an image/vm - and data was just stored as Smalltalk objects. It'd been interesting to see where they might have gone if they coupled the dabbledb front end with gemstone/s.
I always thought dabbledb[1] was a good example of choosing Smalltalk. Sadly the product died, after the team moved to Twitter. Still not sure why they didn't just open up the source. [1] this video