37signals blue

January 21, 2005 6:51 AM

I'm a fan of 37signals, but I don't think we need to do their advertising for them. [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha (staff) to Etiquette/Policy at 6:51 AM (20 comments total)

From the Ta-da List Q&A:

Wait, how is this free?
Nothing's free, right? Well, Ta-da is free. And here's why: We hope you'll enjoy Ta-da so much that you'll consider upgrading to the more powerful version included with Basecamp.

Ta-da is explicitly designed to entice people to buy a more full-featured product. It's not that innovative, since you could easily reproduce it with a sideblog. How is this different than a front-page post to TextWrangler or any other "the first taste is free" product?
posted by kirkaracha at 6:52 AM on January 21, 2005

I understand what you are saying kirkaracha, it is indeed a ploy to sell Basecamp. I felt it was good enough to share with MeFi because the functionality of Ta-Da List is good enough for many people who either can't code it themselves or are too lazy to do so. The improvement over having a sideblog of things to do is the ability to share the list and allow someone else to add to it.
posted by riffola at 7:02 AM on January 21, 2005

I saw TaDa-List mentioned over at 43 Folders and thought it was a rather neat implementation of todo lists. I've set my homepage to it, and it makes it that much more difficult to pop up a web browser and waste time when I should be working.

Despite being a free product intended to sell another product, it's rather useful in its own right.
posted by SemiSophos at 7:10 AM on January 21, 2005

I thought it was cool and have already recommended it to a few friends who'd probably buy BaseCamp--and who would otherwise not have heard of it.
posted by jenleigh at 7:11 AM on January 21, 2005

It's cool and it's free and it's worth a thread to discuss it. Definitely a worthwhile post.
posted by gwint at 7:59 AM on January 21, 2005

I've no problem with useful free apps being pointed out. Today. Tomorrow I may feel differently. And of course it completely depends on the company.

No, seriously - this is fine.
posted by FlamingBore at 8:12 AM on January 21, 2005

We get enough discussion of not-free products around here that I can't fathom how a discussion of a free product could be considered poor form. It's interesting and potentially useful, and even better yet, free in the form that was linked to. How much more best of the web could it be?
posted by jacquilynne at 8:30 AM on January 21, 2005

Free? - check
Useful? - check
Interesting? - check
What's the problem?
I don't think every post should have to pass the creative commons smell test to be accepatable.
posted by Arch Stanton at 9:45 AM on January 21, 2005

So this would be an OK post, right?

TextWrangler, Bare Bones' latest offering, is a free text editor. You can perform in seconds tasks that would take you minutes or hours to do in a word processor or some other tool--if they're possible at all. So now you have no excuse for forgetting to format your text properly.

Free? - check
Useful? - check
Interesting? - check*

* TextWrangler is just as interesting to me at Ta-Da is to you.

The improvement over having a sideblog of things to do is the ability to share the list and allow someone else to add to it.

You could easily do both of those things with a sideblog.

We get enough discussion of not-free products

Personally I think we get too much discussion of products, free or otherwise. But since no one else seems to mind, and the rules are we can link to whatever free products we want to if we think they're cool, I'm through fussin'.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:58 AM on January 21, 2005

I think the distinction between a post on TextWrangler and TaDa is this: TaDa is a tool designed to create shareable web content. While I have no doubt that TextWrangler is a great and free piece of software, it doesn't have the same community applications that TaDa does. TaDa seems more like Flickr, del.icio.us and 43things to me.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:07 AM on January 21, 2005

While TextWrangler would probably slip under my radar, I'll draw a Devil's Advocate distinction. It's not web-based and therefore doesn't seem like a fit.

Best of the web still requires the web.
posted by FlamingBore at 10:16 AM on January 21, 2005

I'm not particularly interested in TextWrangler because it doesn't run on my platform, but yes, I think that'd be a reasonably decent post. Having looked briefly at that page, I wish it *did* run on my platform. Why do Windows text editors and word processor not have regex based editing abilities?
posted by jacquilynne at 10:57 AM on January 21, 2005

Xemacs and GNU Emacs are available for Windows. More regex than you can shake a stick at.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 11:12 AM on January 21, 2005

Emacs? On Windows?! Isn't that one of the signs of the apocalypse?
posted by loquacious at 11:29 AM on January 21, 2005

kirk, textwrangler is only for macs.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:57 AM on January 21, 2005

Was a post on TextWrangler removed in the past or something? It sounds like a reasonable link to me (formerly commercial product released as freeware).
posted by alana at 12:23 PM on January 21, 2005

textwrangler is only for macs.

Sure, and "Ta-da doesn't work with Internet Explorer 5.x" and "requires Internet Explorer 6.x, Safari, or Firefox," so neither product will work for everyone. Their being web-based or not doesn't matter that much to me, but I'm clearly in the minority.

Was a post on TextWrangler removed in the past or something?

Nope, I was just using it as an example of another product that's a stripped-down version of a commercial product whose web page has pitches to buy the full version. (The Ta-Da page has three links to Basecamp and a banner ad for it.) I clearly have a lower tolerance for certain types of product-related posts than reasonable people do.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:55 PM on January 21, 2005

Damn, SemiSophos, that's a good idea. Thanks, from one time-waster to another.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 2:42 PM on January 21, 2005

riffy's post was worth 20 Macsterbation threads, in my humble, and 50 'wow this ad for product X sure is edgy and out there i wonder if it was leaked by the agency?' sucker-punch posts.

And I already knew about the tool in question.

I see your point. In this case, though, I disagree.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:44 PM on January 21, 2005

I thought it was a great post.

My girl, on the other hand, is less enthusiastic. I spent the bulk of the day shouting, "Holy crap, this Ruby on Rails is killer. Look what I can make... but, Hunny Bunny, it only took me four hours to get it installed. We'll eat tomorrow. Hey look, it made all the directories by itself. It's magic."
posted by cedar at 7:53 PM on January 21, 2005