Breakthrough Productivity Apps: Basecamp & Backpack

If you haven’t checked out these very impressive online applications (ASP’s), I couldn’t recommend them too highly. As a company, we’ve been experimenting with all kinds of virtual collaboration tools, project management applications, and such. To date, Basecamp is getting the job done like none other. The fact that it’s caused us to sort our projects into categories (we can see them more clearly this way… duh!) and the way that “milestones” are distributed in the calendar is extremely useful. The interface is clean and easy. We’re just getting into the messages component which I think is going to add a whole new level of virtual teamwork.

And then I started looking for a new way to sort out some of my more personal to-do’s and realized I might want to check out Basecamp’s “little brother,” Backpack. Way easy. Way flexible. I love the easy way that you can make a page public to anyone, or make it a one page collaboration environment with specific people. And again, the interface design is excellent.

I’ve even been getting value from the developing company, 37signals‘ blog: Signals vs Noise. They’ve got more kewl products to check out like “Ta-Da List” and more on the way. These folks and their apps are seriously worthy of your time and exploration. Some of the best stuff I’ve seen on the web in a long time. Thank you, 37signals! I’m a happy new customer of yours. And no wonder some geek called them “the best little web company of 2005.”

PS. Another thing that’s really impressive is the size of the community they’ve ignited, as illustrated by the number of comments to their blog posts… quite different from most blogs including this one 😉