There’s a rapidly growing company called Trello, Inc. which, in my opinion, has the potential to outpace Facebook and Pinterest both in terms of users and practical functionality. The company’s core product, Trello.com, has more than doubled its user base over the past 18 months; as of October, 2015 it had reached ten million total users, and earlier this year the company confirmed nearly two million were monthly active users. That may seem small compared to Pinterest’s one hundred million monthly active users (not to mention Facebook’s 1.55 billion monthly active users). However, if you look closely, Trello appears to be on the verge of doing social media in a way that no other current app can touch.

What is Trello?

Trello is commonly thought of as an online project management app. It was developed by Fog Creek Software in 2011, a company already known at the time for the popular Stack Exchange network (which allows users to post and answer questions about various topics). On July 24, 2014, Trello was spun off as its own company.

The structure of Trello is based upon a concept called “Teams” (previously known as “Organizations”). You’re allowed to create as many Trello Teams as you like, and you are free to be the only member of the Teams you create (or allow others to join one or more of your Teams). Think of a Trello Team as the top-level categorization tool for all the other information inside the app.

Within each Trello Team, you create Trello Boards. Boards are modeled after a traditional lean manufacturing concept known as “Kanban” that was originally developed by Toyota in the 1940’s to facilitate just-in-time manufacturing. Trello Boards are meant to roughly replicate the kind of visual organization techniques one might achieve with a physical corkboard, thumbtacks, and paper notecards.

On each Trello Board, you create Trello Lists and Trello Cards. A List is essentially a column on the Board that can hold Trello Cards, and each List can be easily labeled with any useful title. A common way to organize a Trello Board is to create a series of Lists named as follows: Next, Doing, Delegated, Waiting, and Done.

To the Lists, you add Trello Cards. Cards are the heart of the app, and the functionality they offer is rapidly evolving as development continues. For example, Cards can contain due dates, text comments, checklists, file attachments, images, and links to other places.

Trello Boards and Cards work together in a manner that allows people to organize and sort information in a very intuitive and visual way. Any Card can be dragged and dropped onto any List, and thus fluidly moved around the Board. So, following the example above, if you were to create separate Cards for each of your open projects, you might put some of those Cards in the “Next” List, some in the “Doing” list, some in the “Delegated” list, and so on. You could then move the Cards around the Board as your projects progress, using the Board as a visual status dashboard for them all.

I have previously recorded a video for the ISBA’s YouTube channel to demonstrate this basic functionality in a little under five minutes. You can find it at this URL: http://bit.ly/1PBkmJT (or just Google “brooks trello isba” to see that and some of my other work in this area).

Trello’s Emergence as a Social Networking Engine

Somewhere along the lines, Trello’s rapidly growing user base began taking advantage of the nascent social features embedded within the app (more on those later). Even Trello seems to have been initially caught off-guard by this trend. In a blog post dated June 9, 2014,1 for example, the company wrote:

Recently we noticed a bunch of Twitter buzz about some hot Trello boards. Checking out some stats on Google Analytics, we observed that most of the top viewed public Trello boards are businesses using Trello to publicly roadmap their products.

In other words, other software development companies were creating public Trello Teams and Boards upon which they were inviting their own users to post comments or suggest ideas, and the strategy was taking off in a big way. Following up on that discovery, in October of this year, Trello began actively promoting the practice by integrating Twitter functionality directly into its business class offering, allowing Twitter tweets to be embedded directly within Trello Cards.2

Even so, integrating with other popular social networking engines doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of Trello’s potential as a direct social network itself. As described below, Trello has the underpinnings and architecture to directly and unilaterally become the most useful social network ever created.

The Key Social Networking Features of Trello Teams and Boards

Recall above that Trello is organized into the following basic hierarchy: Teams that contain Boards, and then Boards that contain Lists and Cards. Importantly for our current subject, note that Teams and Boards have adjustable privacy settings which create powerful social dynamics.

Public and Semi-Public Teams and Boards

A Team may, at any time, be set to either private or public. If the Team is set as private, it will not be indexed by search engines, nor will it be visible to anyone who has not been added to the Team. Private Teams are essentially secure workspaces within which a select group of people can set up and collaborate on projects. However, if a Team is set as public, it can be seen by anyone, and its contents will be indexed and searchable through Google, Bing and any other search engine.

Similarly, a Board’s privacy settings can also be adjusted at any time. A Board can be set as private (meaning it is only visible to the creator and other Trello users who are specifically added to that Board), Team-visible (meaning it is only visible to members of the Team within which it resides), and public (meaning, of course, that it is visible to anyone and will be indexed and searchable through public search engines).

Subscriptions and User Tags

Trello has a subscription feature built into its Boards and Cards. Thus, if (through the various privacy settings described above) you have access to any particular Board, the Board’s owner has the option to allow you to subscribe to that Board, or any of its individual Cards. By doing this, you will receive a notification anytime activity occurs on the Boards and Cards to which you are subscribed.

In addition to subscriptions, any Trello user has the ability to tag another Trello user in the comment field of any Card. Tagging a Trello user generates an automatic notification to him or her indicating he or she has been tagged, and the notification includes a link directly to the applicable Card where the discussion is taking place. Generally you must know the Trello username of the person you wish to tag. However, each comment on a Trello Card features a “reply” button that automatically creates a new comment on the same Card with the prior commenter automatically tagged. Thus, Card comments and replies easily facilitate social discussions about the subject of the Card between Trello users who are not personally acquainted. The notifications described in this section show up in a global notification feed, which is the beginnings of a “killer application” that I believe justifies the premise of this article; it’s described next.

The Trello Activity Logs

The Trello activity logs are where the social networking starts to really happen. Every Board to which you have access (again, through the various privacy settings described above) provides a chronological list of the activity which has taken place on that Board. The activity log operates in a similar manner to that of any other social media newsfeed, and will contain records of Card movements, comments on Cards, and other notations about the many ways people might interact with a Card or Board.

Additionally, Trello has the beginnings of a master newsfeed for your entire Trello account, in the form of a “notifications” list (or the aforementioned beginnings of a “killer application”). The notifications list contains a unified record of: Cards within which you are tagged; activity on entire Boards to which you are subscribed; and activity upon any individual Cards to which you are subscribed. Trello’s notification list has the potential to be more powerful and informative than the Facebook or Pinterest newsfeeds, as Trello’s basic structure is more organized, interactive, dynamic, and permanently and collectively organized than any other social platform.

Trello Card Voting

Any Board can be set up to allow other Trello users to “vote” on any specific Card on the Board. This particular feature may be the most important element which propagated the use of Trello as a public roadmapping tool for software development projects. It allows Teams to create Boards and Cards that contain ideas for a product or project in various stages of development, and then gauge the reaction from its user base. Clearly, Cards with high vote counts will be taken more seriously as a potential feature in future product releases. However, the Card voting feature could easily evolve as a competitor to the ubiquitous Facebook “like” button.

Pulling It All Together

If my premise is correct, we will begin seeing widespread use of public Trello Teams, Boards and Cards as stand-alone social networking platforms. Think of a public Trello Board as something equivalent to a Facebook Page: Essentially it is just another easy-to-publish mini-website that revolves around a particular interest, product or service. Subscribing to that public Board would be the equivalent of “liking” a Page. The Card comments, votes, tags, and activity log for that Board would then naturally cause a similar social interactive dynamic which can be filtered locally by reviewing the activity log for that specific Board, or globally through the “notifications” list (again, the aforementioned beginnings of a “killer application”).

A few things need to happen in order to bring about this revolution (and I apologize if they have already taken root beyond my notice):

First, public Trello Boards need to be easier to find. Currently, the most effective way I have found to search them out is through a Google query such as the following: “[insert desired topic] site:trello.com/b/”. For example, Google this phrase exactly as written: “Chicago site:trello.com/b/”. Your search results are likely to contain public Boards containing detailed organizational strategies and information relating to things like restaurants and recreational activities in and about the City. Similarly, a search for “Fallout 4 site:trello.com/b/” is likely to lead you to excellently organized Boards about video games. You may then subscribe to those Boards and receive activity updates in your “notifications” list (again “killer application”), or simply use them as a reference guide for whatever subject you may appreciate the manner in which another person has it arranged.

Second, there needs to be a way to publicly display the number of subscribers on each public Board, and provide some basic de-identified back office demographics about these subscribers for public Trello Board owners. This will allow Trello Boards to be ranked and monetized, and provide significant creative feedback that’s likely to motivate the Trello user base to create interesting Boards and Card content.

Third, there needs to be a way to organize and sort the public Trello Boards to which one has subscribed. Currently Trello allows any Board to be “starred” to one’s Trello home page, and those Boards can be generally sorted in a drag-and-drop fashion. However, if used as the public Board aggregator I hope it will become, this will just end up creating a singular long list of starred Boards. The Trello home page would be much more useful if it included the ability for us each to categorize, file and search all of our starred and subscribed Boards.

Fourth, public Trello Boards should include an option for the owner to name them with intuitive and easy-to-remember subdomains. For example, a public Board about “Acme, Inc.” products should be able to claim the subdomain “Trello.com/acme” if nobody has already claimed it.

Fifth, the Trello “notifications” list and Board activity logs need some enhancements to make them more visually appealing, interactive, and a more prominent feature of the Trello site in general. In my mind, these features should be front-and-center in the same way Facebook and Pinterest present their own newsfeeds, perhaps with the actual personally-addressed notifications placed alongside the main feed somewhere.

Sixth, the Trello Card comments and replies need to be better organized in a way that allows users to filter out comments which are unrelated to a particular comment/reply thread. Currently, the comments on a card simply stack upon one another in chronological order, and it’s not entirely intuitive to see which comments are part of any particular discussion thread.

And finally, there needs to be a Trello, Inc. IPO as soon as possible, because I think this company is most certainly on to something here, and I’d love to own some small stake in what this might become. 

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1. Going Public! Roadmapping with a Public Trello Board, http://blog.trello.com/going-public-roadmapping-with-a-public-trello-board

2. Bird is the Word: Getting Social with Twitter and Trello, http://blog.trello.com/bird-is-the-word-getting-social-with-twitter-and-trello