Social Glass

There’s been a lot of discussion about 37 Signal’s Basecamp over the past few months. I was curious, and from a timing perspective it just so happened that I was leading up a new project, so I went over to the site and created a new account. I’ve got a team of about 5 or 6 young and enthusiastic people working for me on the Strategy phase and the first thing I did was set them up. The second thing I did was migrate the Milestones from my project plan to Basecamp, and I also added a few TODOs.

Within about an hour my RSS aggregator was buzzing with updates. My team started posting messages (blogging), comments and content through the Writeboard (kind of like a wiki).

“Is this Enterprise 2.0?”, I asked myself.

Not quite, but close.

Basecamp is perhaps more structured than I’d expect an Enterprise 2.0 solution to be as it’s centered around project management (the notion of “Milestone” and “TODO” seems to me to be project oriented). But the collaboration and capture of tacit knowledge elements are certainly there, and the signals, boy do I love the signals. Maybe we can call this “Project 2.0″.

Anyway, I think the folks at 37 Signals have done a great job and I’m eager to try out their other products.