37 Signals is launching their latest project – Backpack on Tuesday. Whilst the main site doesn’t seem to have gone live yet a number of previews of this new program have been written which you should check out. I been given a bit of an inside look at it by three readers of ProBlogger in the past 24 hours and I must say that I’m really impressed by it and am looking forward to trying it out for myself.
In short Backpack is a web based way of organizing your information that lets you organize it as you like. It lets you keep some private and allows you to share other bits of it. You can access it via email or via the web. It has blog-like characteristics but also reminds me of a wiki – dynamic stuff, yet simple.
I won’t explain it as well the people behind it so check out this Backpack Preview for the inside word. As I say – I don’t yet have my own Backpack but from what I’ve snuck a look at through others free tries it looks pretty nice.
Also check out business logs mini preview of BackPack.
Update: Backpack is now live.
I guess I’m one of the few who thinks the app is extremely overrated and hyped up. Yes, it allows you to store various information, but why on earth people are so excited about that I just don’t know. I’m not saying the app is useless, but there’s absolutely no reason to go “OMG! OMG! OMG!”. The e-mail features rocks though, I’ll admit that much.
Uffe: People are in awe because of the usability. Feature wise it isn’t hard to duplicate. Usability wise it’s a masterpiece. It just simply works. The amount of AJAX and backend stuff that takes is hidden by the pretty face and nice icons. This is the same resaon people ohh and ahh over Apple’s products when a no name computer from Wal-mart can still do email and web surfing.
Uhm, okay. How sad.
Another thing that’s dissapointing is the “design”. I expected a bit more from design people, but maybe that’s just me.