In the example the company provides on its product page, the user publishes a series of small work orders for research on the names and profiles of top CEOs around the country. That kind of drudgery would take hours to perform, but with Mechanical Turk it can be done on the cheap, quickly.

How should a person feel about the Turks though? We admit that we were a little concerned at first; the last thing we want is to use some creepy neo-colonial crap like ODesk.com, which sends customers hourly webcam photos and screenshots of their contracted overseas labor in action, usually with their eyes flared with surprise at the intrusion.

Mechanical Turk seems different though. There appears to be a real art to using it well, and that is one thing that concerns us about the viability of Smartsheet's product.

We get our Mechanical Turk advice from Andy Baio's Waxy.org. Baio recently paid Turkers 50 cents each to upload a picture of themselves with a paper sign explaining "why you Turk." The responses were incredibly humanizing and more than a little amusing.

Would you want a project management app that let you leverage those peoples' time at a low price? That sounds like a pretty intriguing idea to us.

While we love Basecamp and use it daily here at ReadWriteWeb, the idea of embedding this type of software into a page using only a few lines of code is appealing. Easy to use, you just point to the domain you want it to live on, create a username, password and voila - ProjectThingy spits out the code for you to cut and paste to your site.

Projects

• Name and mission statement
• Status: none, in progress, problem, complete
• Due date
• Milestones with dates and status indicators
• Project members from your user pool

Work items

• Discussion threads with assignments
• Limited client access
• Work items
• Name and description
• Status: none, in progress, problem, complete
• Assign to any project member
• Attach links and files (up to 1GB per file)
• Add link and file revisions
• Clients only see latest revision when assigned

Messages

• Project and work item message threads
• Optionally assign to any project member with status: none, in progress, problem, complete
• Clients only see messages when assigned

User pool

• Unlimited number of users
• User permissions: no access, client, team, administrator

Pricing

There are four levels of pricing and you can cancel your subscription at any time. ProjectThingy will keep your data for six months after you cancel, making it easier for you to return if you change your mind later on.

• Free: 1 Active Project, 50MB Storage
• Small: $19 P/M: 10 Active Projects, 6GB Storage
• Medium: $39 P/M: 30 Active Projects, 20GB Storage
• Large: $139 P/M: Unlimited Projects, 100GB Storage

Using Amazon Web Services for scalability and reliability, ProjectThingy runs on EC2 with a MySQL database with data storage on Elastic Block Storage and files in Simple Storage Service buckets.

The team behind the project Chris and Utka Ritke have created five short videos if you want to learn more or check out their FAQ page.

Qtask Overview

Like SharePoint, Qtask offers a number of features for team collaboration including discussion boards, wikis, file sharing, form creation tools, RSS, calendaring, and full contextual search. With its comprehensive tool set, projects can be created, managed, maintained, and tracked. Because all the information relating to various tasks is online, new team members can get up-to-date quickly on the status of various projects just by signing into Qtask.

Getting Started

When you first sign into Qtask, you're presented with a global dashboard from which you can see an overview of all the most important items, including tasks and their status, meetings you've been invited to and those you're scheduled to attend, recently updated wikis and files, your schedule, team members and other important top-level items. The layout of these items is similar to that of iGoogle and its widgets, which makes it easy to see at a glance everything that you need to focus on.

Global Dashboard

At the top of this dashboard is navigation that can take you deeper into the site - to discussion boards, team calendars, project homepages, and more. Like the global dashboard, each project's homepage focuses on just the key items (meetings, tasks, files, etc.) for that specific project.

It's All In The Details

Although there are many portals for team collaboration like this available today, it's the little details in Qtask that make it worth a look. For example, in the discussion threads, discussions can be set to public or private, unread items appear in a different color, and you can flag items as "hot" to draw attention to them. Team calendars feature thumbnails of the members faces and discussion areas where members can work out details, discuss agendas, etc.

Editing the Meeting Deatails

Other great features include version control for uploaded files and syndication (via RSS) of file shares and wikis - and both of which can even be shared with those outside the company. A site-wide search box lets you perform searches and also offers a number of advanced options to help you find just what you need:

Other Features

Built-in tools for form creation are also included with Qtask as is a mail feature which can be used for internal communications. Outside email like that from Gmail or Yahoo can be integrated with Qtask via IMAP support.

However, one of the most useful features in Qtask is its ability to track changes. File history can be tracked as to who uploaded, downloaded, or accessed a file and when. Tasks, meetings, wikis, and discussions can be tracked as well. This feature has made Qtask so popular with lawyers, that the company will soon be releasing a customized version just for them. (Out of Qtask's initial crop of 2000 users, many are lawyers).

Keeping Track of Changes

Finally, Qtask is available via a mobile browser - a must have for today's on-the-go workforce and remote workers. Whether you use a Blackberry, iPhone, or a standard mobile of some sort, you have access to everything on the site.

On The Horizon

In addition to the upcoming version of Qtask customized for lawyers offices, the company also hopes to create more customized versions for several different types of companies, including perhaps doctors or real estate offices, as those are other popular users of their program.

They also plan to release an enterprise version later on which can be implemented on a company's own servers as an alternative to the SaaS solution they have today.

Affordable And Feature-Rich

Qtask offers plenty of features which will appeal to the SMB market looking for a project-focused web-based tool for team collaboration. The service is very affordable, too: free for 5 users for the first year and comes with 5 hours of free training. Additional users are $50/each per month. Prices include the ability to create unlimited projects, access to online training and online technical support.

At launch time, Qtask is offering a special: charter accounts will only be charged $25/year for additional users.

You can learn more about Qtask from visiting their web site, available at www.qtask.com.

Many people have made cases for Twitter as a tool for business. Here at ReadWriteWeb for example, we told you how Twitter can be used for journalism. We've posted about how companies were using Twitter for customer service and how PR professionals could use it for pitching purposes. The Twitter Fan Wiki is also keeping track of other Twitter usage cases that go beyond simply having conversations.

Despite this growing perception that Twitter can be actually be useful, we haven't seen business applications that make Twitter an essential part of their program...until now.

Project Management Via Twitter

The online project management system Joint Contact has just been updated to allow its members to Twitter their project statuses and other project-related messages - a task normally relegated to email. But email isn't always the right tool for the job - Twittering is faster, simpler, and thanks the the 140-character limit, the messages stay short and to the point. Twitter is also available on a number of devices from computers to PDAs, but unlike email, Twitter also works over SMS, so even those team members without a data plan on their phone can receive Twitter messages about the project when they're away from their computer.

In the Joint Contact online software, project members can post entries from discussion groups directly into Twitter - the subject line of a discussion group doubles as a tweet. Members can also update their work status via Twitter, too.

Twitter in Joint Contact

As far as the actual software itself, Joint Contact looks pretty standard. It allows you to manage tasks, documents, images, contact lists, online discussions, and team announcements in a way that's similar to how Basecamp works.

Twitter Replaces Email

What's most interesting about this recent update to Joint Contact is that it's a great example of how email can be replaced by social media tools. We know that the younger generation communicates via social media - most often on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook - often only using email to communicate with the "old people." We also discussed whether or not email was in danger not too long ago, and received a slew of comments debating this hot topic.

Whether or not you believe that email is danger, you have to admit, email is broken - our inboxes are so overloaded that a non-profit organization IORG has been recently been formed to research solutions to this problem. Well, here's one idea - replace email with other services (like Twitter) when possible to lighten the load on the inbox. For this innovative concept alone, we wish Joint Contact success.

Project Management in DreamFactory

With the availability of DreamFactory on QuickBase, the suite is now available on four different cloudware platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Salesforce App Exchange, WebEx, and now QuickBase. The company is now working on making DreamFactory available on Google App Engine, too.

Each of the DreamTeam Suite's components offer features that put them on par with other similar web apps and desktop software products. The Project Management module, for example, does Gantt charts and resource management, and the Document Collaboration piece allows for sharing, messaging, and version control. A new homepage for the suite lets you see an overview of all the activity of your current projects and allows for one-click workspace creation as well.

DreamTeam's Project Management Module

As for the pricing, DreamTeam is much more affordable than some of its competition - for comparison purposes, Basecamp starts at $24/month and goes up to $149/month, but to get unlimited projects in Basecamp, you must pay the $149/month rate. With DreamTeam however, the money the company saves on infrastructure is passed on to their customers.

For anyone in need of a business suite that's a bit easier on the wallet, DreamTeam should be added to your list. There's a free trial available from the company's homepage, if you want to try out the suite for yourself.

Exporting to Excel

The latest version, Clarizen v2.0, is a major upgrade with many more features and enhancements, including the following:

• Budget Planning: A brand-new budget planning feature is included with this release, allowing you to keep track of Actual vs. Planned budgets as part of the overall work plan.
• Export to Excel: This feature allows you to generate custom reports and export that data to Excel worksheets. The feature is available on the Current Project, Projects, Tasks, and Resource Usage Views.
• "What's New": In version 2.0, new, unread items display in bold text and a "new" icon indicator highlights them in the dashboard's "What's New" panel
• Improved UI: the new version received a facelift and now has a much more user-friendly design than before.
• Duration: You can now enter different time scales for the duration of a project - anything from hours, to days, weeks, or months.
• Usability Enhancements: Enhancements have been made across the entire application, bringing changes like right-click menus, interactive tooltips, optimized screen lengths, extended session time outs and more.
• Modular Projects: You can now move sub-projects from one parent to another or convert a parent project to a sub-project of another project altogether.
• New Views: A new "View" drop-down lets you quickly switch between Budget and Basic views within a project with even more to come soon.

Clarizen Screenshot

In addition to these new features, Clarizen's project management software also offers tools like online collaboration with team members, wiki-like notes and discussion boards, alerting features, and an on-demand, scalable SaaS platform. There's also Clarizen's ProjectMail feature, which lets team members email in updates on their progress as well as receive status reports, tasks and updates from the system itself.

The only drawback for some may be the price. There is no "freemium" model going on here. Instead, the Clarizen software will be available for $50 per user per month, with prepay discounts available. That's double what LiquidPlanner will be charging when they leave beta, and although Clarizen may arguably be the more robust option, the price seems a bit too high for small teams. However experienced PM's who have been waiting for a feature rich web alternative to Microsoft Office will likely find that Clarizen has most of the features they need.

• Task Management: LiquidPlanner's workspace allows you to easily organize and prioritize your tasks. The workspace has two distinct task list views to allow you to view, schedule, and update your work by function or by timeline. Drag-and-drop prioritization lets you change the order of your scheduled tasks as priorities shift. Team members can create folders, subfolders to organize the data at hand so details at any level of a task can be viewed. Global priorities for your entire team or organization can also be managed in this workspace.


• Project Scheduling: LiquidPlanner features a Probabilistic Scheduling engine that uses statistical math, ranged estimates, automatic tracking, and more to create realistic timelines and schedules. Best-and-worst case scenario estimation can help create a more accurate view of timelines. An automatic tracking feature tracks the expected progress on scheduled tasks, so the project schedule stays alive and up-to-date, even when team members don't update it themselves on a regular basis. A promise date alerting feature will let you know when project or task-level commitments are due.


• Collaboration: The dynamic, shared project environment offered by LiquidPlanner allows for collaboration, no matter what size your team is or where they are located. You can invite as many people to the project workspace as needed, even if they are outside your organization. A wiki-like commenting feature lets everyone keep a record of the dialogue about a task or project. Each item has its own comment page, where everyone in the space can communicate. Documents and links can be uploaded and shared with team members to let everyone communicate efficiently.

Liquid Planner is free during its beta period, which is occurring now. Afterwards, it will remain free for a single users, but teams of two or more will need to pay a monthly subscription fee.