But there is one problem. Basecamp is browser native. I want mobile native. And ReadWriteWeb's VP of Content Dev Marshall Kirkpatrick tweeted today that he wants a Basecamp AIR app. Either way, it's clear that browser-only doesn't cut it anymore for Basecamp.

Let's focus on the mobile issue in this post. Like many people, I don't live at my desk. I am up and about, meeting people. I like it that way. So I rely on my Blackberry to stay in touch. But here is the problem. I get an email notification of a post within Basecamp. I can read it fine, no problem. But when I want to reply, I have to use the Blackberry browser to log into Basecamp. That is kludgy to say the least. So I open an email thread, annoying everybody else on the team.

Sure I could switch to an iPhone with a better browser. But that still relies on good connectivity all the time and I don't want to be forced to make that switch. I want something like Twitterberry, a native Blackberry interface to Basecamp.

But when you look at the world through mobile eyes, you see that this is not an incremental change. It is as fundamental as moving from Client Server to browser-native. Browsers on small mobile screens are talking heads on early TV.

This Is a Hard Problem to Solve

Some problems are totally easy to define, such as a cure for cancer, longer lasting batteries or really cheap solar energy - but much, much, much harder to implement. So I am going to do the easy bit - define the problem - and hope that somebody comes up with the solution.

The needs are in 3 "buckets":

1. Mobile Native user interface
2. User centric, not project centric
3. Collaborative list building

Start With Mobile

My short-hand description is "like Basecamp but mobile native". That is easy to say, but tough to implement for 4 reasons:

1. Mobile native user interface. Ideally 90% of my actions are on a mobile device with a tiny screen and keyboard. I will do the more complex configuration and housekeeping type work on a browser in the 10% of my time when I am working on a fully fledged laptop/desktop. Most developers spend 90% of their time creating on a laptop/desktop and only 10% communicating in the "real world". For most of us, that ratio is different.

2. Offline syncing. Much of the time my mobile device is "off air". Those are opportunities to catch up on To Do Lists, Objectives, Milestones and the other planning type activities. You can do these sitting on an airplane, train or waiting in line at Starbucks. Syncing your personal planning to your group communication tool (Basecamp or whatever) is an annoying extra step that is a time sink.

3. Any mobile device. I use a Blackberry. I like it, but I may get seduced by the iPhone or may have something totally different in the future. More to the point, I cannot possibly predict what devices my collaborators will have and the vast majority of mobile devices are neither Blackberry nor iPhone. Communication has to work at the lowest common denominator but the user interface has to be native. As a Blackberry user, I don't care a hoot about the compromises the developer faces having to design for Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, etc. The same is true for people with other devices, iPhone users being the most vehement about native user interfaces.

The SMS Lowest Common Denominator?

SMS without the interrupt or cost issues. "Lowest common denominator for communication" makes one think of SMS. But SMS has major costs - both time and money. Services that generate lots of email messages are bad enough, but lots of SMS messages are way worse.

Individual Centric, Not Project Centric

This may be even hard to solve than mobile native, but the issues are linked.

Like many people I multi-task across multiple projects, working with different teams in different companies. This is an increasingly common experience for many people, even if multiple projects/teams within one company is still more common. "Dipping in and out of" multiple Basecamp projects is a pain. My To Do List may be tagged by Project, but I want only one To Do List, that syncs with individual Projects To Do Lists.

Collaborative List Building

Many people use Excel for building lists - marketing lists, to do lists, feature lists and so on. It may be a hammer to crack a nut, not what it was designed for, but people do this. As list building requires collaboration we start using "web office" type spreadsheets such as Google Apps or Zoho. This is classic "hammer to crack a nut". Excel is still better than any web office competitor for heavy duty spreadsheet work, such as building a financial model for a venture, but relatively weak on collaboration. List building needs very simple features but needs to be very collaboration intensive. A slightly more sophisticated version of Tasks on a Blackberry that is collaborative might be close.

The Solution: a User Interface Maestro!

This may come as an extension to Basecamp or a totally different service that can use services such as Basecamp. Or even an alternative to Basecamp, much as I love them.

These problems cannot be solved at the technical level only. I am sure the architecture issues are important, but this is primarily a user interface challenge. This requires inspiration, a real user interface maestro.

Using Twitterberry shows some of the issues. It is a lot better than using SMS and the browser directly, but it is still sorely lacking (as 4 days of TweetPorting from Web 2.0 Expo made very clear). And Twittering is one simple task/feature. Doing this for the richness of tasks in Basecamp is an order of magnitude harder.

A short term fix for me could be a native Blackberry interface to Basecamp. If 37 Signals offered this I would be happier and if they also did iPhone and Symbian for Nokia and others they could crack the "mobile native" issue. but I suspect it would not solve my "individual centric, not project centric" issue.

Also Basecamp was "born on" the browser. I suspect that something "born on" the mobile phone could be the next generation.

Does this need resonate with you and have you seen anything like this in the wild? Or in Beta? Finally, is Basecamp really the best project management solution now in this increasingly mobile-based work world? We'd love to hear your suggestions for alternatives.

The Periscope Gadget allows users to control multiple Basecamp accounts from their iGoogle homepage. The gadget provides access to Basecamp activity and allows users to add and manage time entries, download files, and more. The design for the Periscope Gadget is simple and effective, with hover-over link effects to keep the interface as simple as possible without leaving out important details. On the downside, the gadget does not allow you to leave comments on an entry nor add/complete "to-do" items. It has been noted that the team behind Periscope is working hard to bring these features to users. The gadget is accessible from iGoogle, Windows desktops with Google Gadgets installed, and the iPhone for easy on-the-go access.

Allowing Access to Basecamp

To allow the Periscope Gadget to access your Basecamp account read the following instructions or watch this screencast:

"1. Login to your own Basecamp account. Your URL will be something like http://yourdomain.updatelog.com/ or any of the 5 domains that 37 signals owns (updatelog.com, grouphub.com, clientsection.com, seework.com, projectpath.com) and you'll need to use the username and password that you chose when you signed up with them. 2. Click on the Account (Upgrade/Billing) tab. 3. Scroll all the way down on the new page. 4. Close to the bottom is a "Basecamp API" section. Click on the check box that is labelled "I've read and agree to the Basecamp terms of service..." -- you should actually click on the terms of service and read them. 5. Click on the button that says "Yes, please enable the Basecamp API for this account" -- wait a few seconds, and voila! You're done! Basecamp API access is enabled!"

If you think the Periscope Gadget is worth a try or if you're already using Periscope in iGoogle, let us know your thoughts on the iGoogle gadget in the comments sections.

Getting Started

After signing up, you will be greeted with the currently empty dashboard, which gives you a few shortcuts to start customizing your plan with your company logo, invite your team members, and create your first goal.

As you customize your plan, you also get the option to set a default currency for your financial information. The default currencies are Dollars, Euros, Yen, and Pounds, but you can also change this to any other currency you might need.

Setting Goals

You goals can only fall into three categories: Solutions, Marketing and Sales, or Organization. While this simplicity makes sure that you do not unnecessarily complicate things by starting to micro-manage your goals, some companies might find this too limiting. On the other hand, as the folks at Organized Wisdom point out, PlanHQ is not so much a project management tool, but "an action management tool."

Correction: You can actually create your own categories, though this function is a bit hidden and can only be found in the settings menu. The folks at PlanHQ assured as that they were going to make this more obvious and add more links to these customization options in a couple of spots throughout the site.

The overall process of creating a goal is quite simple and asks you to define your goal, the importance of that goal, the team members responsible for achieving it, and, optionally, you can also send a message about the goal to your team and board members. Of course, you can also set the deadline for your goal here.

As is typical in this kind of application, once a goal is created, other users can comment on it and add attachment to it as well.

As you add more goals, you can then later reschedule them, mark them as done etc. PlanHQ will keep track of this and will gently remind you if you start falling behind at some point.

As PlanHQ's founder Tim Norton told us, some customers also use the goals feature as a bug tracking tool, with the advantage that all team members can easily keep an eye on the development instead of the developers working only in the silo of their own system.

Financials

The 'Financials' section of PlanHQ follows the same guidelines as the goal setting section, in that it tries to keep things simple, but without dumbing down the process. You can add information about your budget and actual expenses here and based on this, PlanHQ creates a number of graphs and general statistics indicating if you are on your path to profitability yet. It's important to note that PlanHQ here is trying to give you a general overview of your financials and that it is not a complete financial planning tool.

What was missing here, we thought, was the ability to import or export any of this data. However, we have heard from PlanHQ that they are planning on adding the ability to import and export spreadsheet in the near future and that they are especially considering some form of integration with the spreadsheet component in Google Docs.

Cost

PlanHQ offers a three month free trial for RWW readers, but after that, you will have to sign up for a paid plan. PlanHQ offers three different plans, ranging from $9 a month for a plan with 3 team members and 10 active goals, to the 'Small' plan for $24 a month and 15 active goals, up to the 'Pro' plan, which offers an unlimited number of team members as goals. Both the 'Small' as well as the 'Pro' plan include the ability to set private goals and connect through a secure SSL connection.

What About Basecamp?

Basecamp, at first sight, would be the closest direct competitor to PlanHQ (even the URLs are similar, after all). But even though they share a lot of functionality (to-dos, writeboard, milestones, etc., PlanHQ is more focused on teams and achieving goals. During our tests, it seemed that using PlanHQ would make it easier to focus on the big picture, while Basecamp seemed to invite more micro-managing.

Signing Up

PlanHQ is giving our readers a special deal: while you would normally only get a 30 day free trial, signing up through this link will get your thee months of free service.

Lachlan said that his favorite 3 things online were Twitter (www.twitter.com), Tumblr (www.tumblr.com) and Fire Eagle (www.fireeagle.yahoo.net).

There are literally thousands of great web apps to choose from, many of which have been profiled here on RWW. Tell us your current 3 favorites in the comments. We'd especially love to discover new things that may be flying under the radar...

Cat photo: Kevin Steele

New York based technology and consulting firm Arc90 introduced its first publicly available product today: Kindling. Arc90 describes Kindling as an "idea management and collaboration tool for small groups and companies." A more straightforward way to describe it would be as a version of Digg or reddit for small groups. Unlike those sites, however, Kindling focuses purely on voting on original ideas, not news stories.

Kindling puts an interesting twists on its voting scheme. Users only get 10 votes to give away at any given time and they can distribute those freely among different ideas.

Kindling is split into three main sections: voting, submitting ideas, and 'making it happen.'

The voting and commenting on new ideas is about as simple as it can get, with the exception of the 10 vote constraint. Arc90 says the limited amount of votes is meant to make users more picky about what to vote for, ultimately making every vote more meaningful. While users can always take votes away from a project themselves, once an idea is approved or rejected, all votes are returned to the user to replenish their supply.

The 'make it happen' section of the site displays the status of all the different ideas that have been submitted, but it also allows users to take charge of an idea by assigning it to themselves.

Kindling's user interface is simple and elegant. The minimalist design philosophy of the voting process extends to the rest of the application. The submission form, for example, is about as stripped down as possible.

Democracy at Work

Kindling is taking an interesting approach to small group collaboration. While it is not trying to be a complete project management application like Zoho Projects or Basecamp, and far less complex in its execution than its direct competitor IdeaScale (we wrote about them here), I could see it work very well in a small organization or even an informal group. For the voting system to work well, Arc90 recommends to have at least six members in a group - but there doesn't seem to be an upper limit.

Beta Invites

During the beta period, Kindling is going to be free, after that, beta testers will get reduced pricing for a year once the paid version launches.

Update: We have now given out all of our invites. If you would still like to get one, you can sign up for one on the Kindling homepage.

We have 50 invites for Kindling to give away. Just leave a comment below and we will get back to you ASAP. Note: if you use OpenID to comment, we can not see your email address.

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.