Ta-da! It’s what you get when lists and RSS collide…

Getting around to saying something coherent about Basecamp (we’re impressed by it) is on the list of things to do, but the people behind Basecamp are not making things any easier by coming up with still more net-based goodness - this time, it’s a service I could use for that list of to-dos…

Ta-da Lists is one of those ideas that I wish I’d had - blindingly simple, incredibly effective, and done by someone else before I had a chance to think of it. Basically, it’s online to-do lists - but with the twist that they can be shared with others, and subscribed to via RSS.

To-do lists themselves are hardly revolutionary, and shared lists aren’t exactly new either - but what Ta-da Lists does is to make the sharing process simple and flexible. You can open your list to the world, giving everyone read access, or allow selected colleagues the ability to see and change the items on the list. And every list has an automatic RSS feed that you can use to keep up-to-date in your newsreader of choice. This is a great way of sharing simple task lists with other members of a project team that don’t need (or are frightened by) access to a full-blown PM system such as Basecamp, or simply sharing lists around - between friends, family members and so on. We’ve been using wikis for this for a while now, but Ta-da Lists makes the whole process very much more straight forward.

The use of RSS for distributing this sort of semi-structured information is perhaps the most intriguing aspect, and it’s something that we’ve been looking at in several contexts for a while now. Over the next couple of days I’ll post some more details about what we’ve been doing, and some ideas for how RSS can help get the right information to the right people at the right time.

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