Some companies just blog about updates to their own technology and that's good for existing users to see. Others are fun to read whether you're a user or not. Here are some of the company blogs we recommend reading for a good time.

You can't talk about interesting company blogs without mentioning Signal vs. Noise, the wildly successful blog about design, usability and small business from the makers of project management service Basecamp. This blog could easily stand on its own as compelling reading even if there wasn't a company behind it selling services. Sure enough, it's even got an ad on it from the elite boutique ad network The Deck. Signal vs. Noise has 88k subscribers - making it fun and educational for those subscribers is great for the business of 37signals.

Ning

Ning powers niche social networks and the company's blog is a great place to find out about all kinds of groups that are actively using this technology. Some of them a real surprise. The International Society of Space Entreprenuers, the Eat Local Foods Coalition of Maine and the ASPCA Book Club all have social networks! Who knew? Now how about some data portability, Ning? If you want to read about the theoretical side of niche social networks, check out data portability lovin' competitor PeopleAggregator's blog, written by the company's prolific CEO Marc Canter.

Viddler

Viddler is a crazy feature rich video hosting service with a very good blog. In addition to feature announcements, the company posts a wide variety of videos that are interesting to watch. That's where I discovered this one below, for example.

Newsgator

RSS company Newsgator has a great blog about RSS use cases, data portability debates and other industry topics. Maybe I'm just an RSS head - but I really enjoy their blogging. Newsgator competitor Attensa also has a very good blog about all things RSS - but it sure could use some more updates!

A.viary

Collaborative design tool A.viary has a couple of very good blogs. Their idea blog is full of interesting content that regularly hits the front page of digg. These folks have some seriously juvenile gender issues going on, which I have given them a hard time about before, but their blog is still fun to read otherwise. Every post they put up is worth a look.

Adaptive Path

User experience and design firm Adaptive Path publishes a very thought provoking blog. I usually scan company blogs for announcements and videos - but their longer posts often convince me to stop and read. OLPC: The Beauty of Failure and Greedy Mobile Interfaces? I'll stop and read posts with titles like that.

Amazon Web Services

What could be more dreary than commoditized data processing and storage services? While that might sound boring, the AWS Blog does a great job of highlighting cool things that are done on top of Amazon Web Services. Lately they've put up posts about how AWS are being used by the New York Times to provide online access to 150 years of archives and by the little ShareThis widget that you've probably seen on hundreds of thousands of blogs around the web. Lots of charts, graphs and other fun stuff for nerds on this blog.

Strands

Here at RWW we've been following the mega-funded recommendation service Strands for several years. We find what they do fascinating. Their company blog is mostly about company announcements, but they have really interesting announcements. Last.fm on Nokia phones? Cool! The most interesting section of their blog though is the data portability category and throughout the blog you'll find some really deep thoughts on cutting edge innovation.

Articulate

Articulate is a an e-learning tools company with a very popular blog. More than 20,000 subscribers actively discuss topics like how to make a good screencast and how best to work with clip art. This was a new one to me but I've already enjoyed spending some time on this company's blog. What more could you ask from a company blog? Good content creates a community of advocates that share the blog with friends, some of whom undoubtedly will purchase the company's products.

These Are But a Few

There really are a fair number of interesting company blogs around the web. We'd love to hear about some of your favorites. Others that are worth checking out include Oracle Apps Lab for a fun discussion of web 2.0 in the enterprise, the Lijit blog on "searching the social graph" and the many fun blogs published by Adobe.

If you found this post of interest, you might enjoy reading our coverage of some of the top new social media company evangelists as well.

We hope you find some of these blogs worth subscribing to and we'd love to learn about other blogs that cover topics of general interest that even non-customers would enjoy reading.

"We're flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we're just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout," said 37Signals founder Jason Fried by email. "We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for." We sought comment from Kyle Consalus via the official HuddleChat support room, but received no response other than confirmation that he, Delaye, and Kowitz are Googlers.

This is not the first time that an application has taken design cues from 37Signals. Many early Ruby on Rails applications end up looking similar to 37Signals' own creations (HuddleChat was built in Python), such as forum software Beast, which borrowed what it calls the "sheet of paper" design from 37Signals. But this goes beyond design inspiration, Jason Fried told us.

Another interesting wrinkle to this story: 37Signals is supported by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who invested in the company in July 2006, and the Chicago-based company's web apps all run on Amazon's web services platform, a competitor in many respects to Google App Engine. Could it be that Google purposely chose to clone one of Amazon web services' greatest success stories specifically to show off the power for their new platform? Perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that Google unveiled App Engine at an event it called Campfire ...

Let us know your thoughts on the controversy in the comments below.

UPDATE: Google Takes Down HuddleChat After Complaints About 37Signals Ripoff

Lesson 1: Ignore The Great Unknown

Jason started his presentation talking about "the great unknown," which he defined as the things that hang over every entrepreneur's head when they are starting a company. For example, "what about when we have 1M customers or 100 employees." Jason encouraged people to ignore these concerns and focus on the now. He pointed out that often as entrepreneurs, we worry about the impact of our decisions rather than just making the right decision. He asserted that this is crazy, because decisions made today don't have to last forever - we "must optimize for today."

Lesson 2: Watch Out for Red Flags

The next point was about interpersonal dynamics in the workplace and watching out for what he called 'red flags.' Red flags are basically words or phrases that end up causing problems in communications. For example, at 37 Signals they learned to be careful with the words: need, can't, easy, only, and fast. For example saying, how easy someone else's job is or that they can't ship a product without one feature.

Lesson 3: Be Successful and Make Money by Helping Other People be Successful and Make Money

He talked about the powerful reaction people had to Basecamp when they first released it (Basecamp is a very lightweight project management tool). They realized this was because the tool was helping other people do their job better. This has become part of their philosophy, looking for opportunities in the marketplace to "spot chain reactions and be the catalyst" around helping others.

Lesson 4: Target Nonconsumers and Nonconsumption

This is actually a concept that Jason borrowed from Clayton Christensen (a famous professor at Harvard Business School) in the books Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution. The idea is that there exists an entire market of nonconsumers, or people who have a need but existing players aren't targeting these people. The advantage of targeting this segment is that you minimize the chance for competition from entrenched players.

Lesson 5: Question Your Work Regularly

At 37 Signals, Jason reported they are always asking questions to make sure they are doing the right things. Internally, this list of questions includes:

• why are we doing this?
• what problem are we solving?
• is this actually useful?
• are we adding value?
• will this change behavior?
• is there an easier way?
• what's the opportunity cost?
• is it really worth it?

Lesson 6: Read your Product

Given the firm's background, this was a lesson I found particularly interesting. Jason claimed that the "Biggest sin on the internet right now is bad copywriting ... paying too much attention to pixels and not enough attention to words." Beyond this he pointed out that words are actually less expensive to correct and improved copy will make doing the design second result in a stronger design.

Lesson 7: Err on the Side of Simple

As surprising as I found the last lesson, this one was probably the most obvious given 37 Signal's business. Jason pointed out that you should always "start with the easy way." The interesting and non-obvious point was that he extended this beyond product issues. For example, he recommended people start a company by setting up an LLC, until they need a C Corp.

Lesson 8: Invest in What Doesn't Change

Jason said that this is the "best business advice he's gotten in some time." It interesting because this isn't something that is intuitive, when you think about tech companies which tend to be focused on what is new and upcoming. However, Jason pointed out that principals can last. For example at 37 Signals, he said they anticipate in 10 years "simple, affordable software" will still be worth investing in.

Lesson 9: Follow the Chefs

Jason called chefs the smartest business professionals. He explained this is because they are aware that you become famous and successful by giving knowledge away. For example, chefs have cooking shows and write cook books. Yet it doesn't stop their restaurants from being successful. In fact, he claimed they are probably more successful because of their sharing.

Lesson 10: Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity

Originally David Heinemeier Hansson (Jason's partner) and Jason didn't live in the same city. They eagerly awaited David moving to Chicago and being able to get even more done. Interestingly, when David arrived they actually found productivity decreasing. At 37 Signals, they have come to believe that this was due to the increased interruptions; and so they ended up favoring passive communication like email versus things that are more instantaneous but also interrupt your workflow.

Lesson 11: Road Maps Send You in the Wrong Direction

When talking about business plans, financial projections, or features for products 37Signals believes road maps are bad, because "they lock you into the past." The only exception is APIs, because people are counting on it. Instead he said your expectation should be "do the right thing at the right time."

Lesson 12: Be Clear in Crisis

At the beginning of this year, 37 Signals had some infrastructure problems that resulted in a few hours of unscheduled downtime. This was widely discussed on the internet. They quickly posted about what had happened and during the technical problems kept they the homepage updated with status messages. Through this experience, it reinforced their belief that people love you even more if you are open, honest, public and responsive during a crisis.

Lesson 13: Make Tiny Decisions

Rather than trying to make major decisions, when possible, Jason encouraged entrepreneurs to break problems down to the atomic level. In web properties, this is especially powerful because they've been able to break features down to the atomic level and then launch them one at a time. This is good because the team can gain momentum and celebrate little launches. However, it's also good because "when you make tiny decisions, you can't make big mistakes."

Lesson 14: Make it Matter

Jason ended his presentation by encouraging the audience to make sure their work was significant. He talked about how meaningful he felt the products they were creating were for individuals. Before opening it up for questions, he said that "everything you do should matter."

Conclusion

One of the things I love most about SXSW is the transparency with which so many leaders share about their business. At last year's festival, two of my favorite panels were: Web App Autopsy and The Figures Behind the Top Web Apps.

We'd love to hear any good case studies or lessons you've learned running startups or in business. Please share them in the comments below.

The day after we wrote about Backpack we wrote a post using Twitter as an example talking about how it is smart to let your customers help define your app. In it, we even linked to a chapter from 37Signals' book Getting Real about finding the right customers. While the main thrust of the article was about providing APIs and open access to products (something that 37Signals already does for many of their apps, including Backpack), the idea in general can be applied to the Backpack update, at least in theory.

Looking over the Backpack sales numbers this morning, I started thinking about my Backpack post last week, and I began to notice a contradiction between it and the post about letting customers define your product. In one post we wondered if perhaps 37Signals was "not eating their own dogfood, so to speak." While the other could be used to point out that if the changes to Backpack were a result of dogfood consumption, then it is likely that what they were doing is letting users define their application.

While I'm not privy to the motivations of the company, it seems likely that multiuser support, and the other features added to Backpack yesterday were things that current users of the app were asking for. As they wrote in their book, if a feature is worth adding, your customers will keep bugging you about it. "If it's really worth remembering, they'll remind you until you can't forget."

Changes as big as the ones 37Signals launched this week are not done on a whim. My guess is that these are mostly things customers had asked for -- and not just once, but a lot, over a long period of time.

So maybe, rather than losing focus and falling prey to feature creep, 37Signals was doing what we'd advised just a day earlier -- letting their customers define their app. Backpack started out as a simple organizational tool aimed at a single user. Perhaps customers helped define new use cases that prompted 37Signals to adapt the application to better suit the way in which people were using it.

I still worry that the changes have set it on a crash course with Basecamp, and I really hope that when the two apps collide the result is the a la carte service I envisioned last week. For now, though, maybe the changes to Backpack are just what the customer ordered.

Then yesterday, Fried announced two more new Backpack features: messages and newsroom. Messages is just what it sounds like, a message board where users of the same Backpack project can talk to one another. While newsroom is an activity feed for the Backpack. For any 37Signals fan these features should sound familiar because they already exist in one of the company's other popular applications, Basecamp. Basecamp is a great groupware tool that we rely on daily to manage our activities here at ReadWriteWeb. Backpack is starting to feeling a lot like Basecamp in a different skin.

With the addition of messages and an activity feed, both apps now sport more or less the exact same feature set. Both have lists, messages, files, and writeboards. The main difference is in the way those things are displayed and how much control users have over them. While Basecamp breaks everything out into separate pieces, Backpack combines them all on a single page in any configuration you want. Both approaches have their merits, but is it necessary that they exist as separate apps?

The implications of the upcoming changes haven't been lost on users. "Cool. So Backpack is the new Basecamp with a better calendar," wrote user Jim on the 37Signals blog. "Does anyone else now feel like Backpack will have too much," chimed in Tim. "With the announcement of these new features (which are great), the difference b/w Basecamp & Backpack is starting to blur."

When others echoed the sentiment, Fried responded. "Basecamp is your project management tool, Backpack is your company intranet," he wrote. "Basecamp and Backpack are entirely different products for different purposes. We use both for very different things."

But while Basecamp and Backpack still have some major differences when it comes to things like permissions handling, which drastically effects the use cases for each, they do now share most of the same features. That brings me back to the question about whether 37Signals has lost focus with the app.

When I saw Jason Fried speak at the BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit last fall, Fried was asked by the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, how do you avoid feature creep? According to Fried, the key is the ability and willingness to say no. "You have to be a hard ass," he told Mossberg. So with Backpack going from a simple, single person organizational tool to what Fried now describes as a "company intranet," has 37Signals lost focus and succumbed to feature creep? Are they not eating their own dogfood, so to speak?

The answer is a firm maybe. When talking about feature selection in their popular book about their software development methods Getting Real, the company writes that when building a web application you should start with just the single core feature. Say "no" to all the others. But that doesn't mean to you always have to say no to new features. "Start off with a lean, smart app and let it gain traction," they write. "Then you can start to add to the solid foundation you've built."

That is more or less what they've done with Backpack. Started lean, let is get traction, then expanded it to where they thought it should go. But as an application Backpack has clearly evolved beyond a simple organizational tool to something that is starting to resemble their Basecamp application (which we, incidentally, already basically use as our intranet). Whether they've fallen prey to feature creep will really be measured by the response of their users. If people remain confused over the difference between Backpack and its cousin Basecamp, then the answer is yes, somewhere they stopped following their own advice and said "yes" to one too many feature that was better suited to one of their other applications. But if people embrace both apps as complimentary offerings, as Fried clearly hopes they will, then they've made the right decisions.

37Signals offers a range of applications, from simple, single-function apps like Ta-Da Lists (to-do lists), Writeboard (collaborative word processor), and Campfire (group chat) to more complicated apps like Basecamp (project management) and Highrise (group contact manager).

In the past, 37Signals has often integrated its simpler products into its more complicated offerings. Basecamp has Campfire chats, Writeboard shared writing spaces, and to-do lists clearly based on Ta-Da, for example. Along with their slow shift toward full OpenID support, this points to the potential for a modular, create-your-own app system from 37Signals, where users could pick and choose which of the company's applications to install. That's completely speculation on our part, but we really hope that's the direction 37Signals is headed.

What do you think? Has 37Signals lost focus with Backpack? Or do you still see differences distinct enough between Basecamp and Backpack that you could see yourself using both? Do you wish the functionality of both applications was merged into a single app? Let us know in the comments below.