ReadWriteWeb

Blogs are abuzz this morning about HuddleChat, a real-time chat application that a team of three Google developers created to show off Google's new App Engine platform. The chat software bears a striking resemblance to the popular Campfire app from 37Signals. On blogs (here and here, too), on Twitter, and even on the HuddleChat App Engine gallery page people are ripping into Google for allegedly copying the application's design and feature set. 37Signal's founder Jason Fried told us by email that he was "disappointed" in Google. So what's going on here?

I'm back at SXSW as one of the RWW contributors covering the interactive festival. This afternoon I attended Jason Fried's presentation on "Stuff We've Learned at 37 Signals". 37 Signals is a software company headquartered in Chicago, IL that started as a interactive design company and has since become one of the leading software companies for personal productivity software.

Last week we wrote a piece questioning whether perhaps 37Signals had lost focus with the upgrades to their popular Backpack organizational tool. We argued that the changes were morphing Backpack from a simple organizational tool into a robust intranet system that put it on a collision course with Basecamp, the company's groupware application. Many commenters on the 37Signals blog felt the same way, though most on this blog seemed to disagree. Ultimately, we decided that "whether [37Signals has] fallen prey to feature creep will really be measured by the response of their users."

This week, 37Signals started to preview the upcoming update to their Backpack service, which received its last major update in July. Though most of the new features seem very useful, they also seem to transform the app from a simple organizational tool into something else entirely. We can't help but wonder, considering the company wrote the book on keeping things simple in software development, has 37Signals lost focus with Backpack?