Recent Entries

First Impressions: Backpack

Monday / 02 May 05

Initially I thought I was not among the lucky ones, but yesterday I recieved a Golden Invitation from 37signals to preview a beta version of their upcoming service called Backpack. After playing with it for a couple of hours and thinking about the service and its potential use, I’d like to share my first impressions.

Who? What? Backpack?

You might not have heard of Backpack, but you probably have heard of 37signal’s other products: Basecamp and Ta-da List. Both services evolve around managing and organizing your information and communication — Backpack is no different. Backpack aims to manage and organize your personal information.

The service tries to achieve this through a couple of very simple features: to-do lists, notes, pages, automatic reminders through e-mail or SMS and sharing your information with a select few or the entire world. While the first couple are pretty straight-forward, the latter are the most interesting. The ease of automatically being reminded through SMS sounds very usefull. I have not been able to test this yet due to the fact that my Dutch carrier (KPN) is not listed. Even better is the ability to add content through e-mail, which can be sent from your computer or, as I have tried, from your mobile phone.

There’s also the possibility of sharing your information with people. You can share per person or make the entire page public or e-mail the entire contents to people. Edits to the content are tracked and can be subscribed to via RSS.

What’s it like?

The interface screams 37signals — easy to use mixed with some XMLHttpRequest to add that bit of power. As a test I added a page to organize my upcoming summer vacation with information related to the destination, date and the friends I travel with. Furthermore, I added a small to-do list as well as a reminder to actually pay on time. Yes, there is software that is capable of doing this for you already, but the advantage here is that it’s a web-based service along with the ability to interact with it beyond my laptop.

It isn’t flawless though. Each page has a unique, semi-random e-mail address you can use to send content to, but this is reasonably hard to remember. Instead, I prefer to define my own e-mail address, which is perfectly possible because of the hostname containing the username. Also, I would have loved being able to set reminders for more than one people.

Eureka?

Having used it for a couple of times now, Backpack seems to be a very useful service. It’s easy and is capable of managing and organizing your personal information very well once it has become part of your routine. Perhaps that’s one of my personal problems though — it seems as if every of 37signals’s service so far needs one of those “Eureka!” moments for me to understand its value and understand how it could be of use to me. Right now, that specific moment has almost arrived, but not yet.

Backpack will launch May 3rd.

Posted in Misc, Technology | 6 Comments