Real-time collaboration moving too fast? Try Basecamp’s Daily Digest
37signals, a startup that offers online tools for business and collaboration, just announced “a really powerful feature” (the company’s words for “its project management service Basecamp — daily email updates”).
Yes, email. That seems awfully retro, doesn’t it? Especially for a service that offers plenty of tools that do things like assign tasks, share files and more in real-time. But of course that richness and speed can be a problem in-and-of-itself. With so much potentially going on in Basecamp, it can become rather overwhelming to keep track of everything. Once users sign up, they get an email every day at 9am telling them about completed to-dos, new to-dos, new milestones and completed milestones for the project.
We’ve been writing a lot about the tension between real-time updates and something a little more slow-spaced on social sites like Facebook and FriendFeed. It’s interesting to see collaboration companies try to strike a similar balance on the business side — in this case, a daily email might give a better view of the big-picture than just watching the real-time updates.
San Francisco-based 37signals is funded by Bezos Expeditions.
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.