Flickr Photo: Cubbie_n_ VegasIf you're anywhere around my age -- I'm 33, I can admit it -- you don't remember how small the world used to be. Before the advent of the jet airliner in the 1950s, intercontinental travel was long, hard, and expensive. Only the very rich went abroad. Getting around the U.S. was no piece of cake either: until the interstate system, traveling by car was long, tedious, and expensive, too.

Infrastructure improvements, coupled with rising incomes and an increased awareness of cultures other than our own, has caused travel to skyrocket world-wide. The National Academy of Engineering figures that, "Over the past five decades, Earth’s inhabitants have increased their travel demand from an average of 1,400 to 5,500 km, using a combination of automobiles, buses, railways, and aircraft." This has fundamentally changed the way we live.

Now, let's think about your data.

While Open Source has been widely embraced in the server and CMS markets, it has yet to take off in the CRM field, so I'm glad to see that the Code for Change Team has a new release of CiviCRM Standalone out there. I hope they keep the momentum going.

Things I really like about it (after noodling for about 15 minutes):

• It works with MyOpenID. Shouldn't everything work with an OpenID?
• The admin panel is so easy to understand!
• It's blazin' fast on their test server.

Many features need more work, but this release is REALLY early. I can say that I think it's starting to look like the real deal. I hope that they'll spend some time prettifying it, too. I'm a sucker for a pretty application.