More thoughts on the latest web apps

Writely's Jen didn't like my speculating that Writely's days are numbered. Writely does have impressive hype on the web for such a narrow and technically unimpressive service, so they must be doing something right in terms of business and marketing. But there is very low barrier to entry for online document creation/sharing/blogging (the only hard part, technically, would be handling the load), and more compelling packages of such services are sure to be coming from bigger fish. Or have already arrived: 37signals has Writeboard, and it integrates with Backpack. Now what if Google or Yahoo! wiggle their little finger and bring some more competition? If I worked for Writely, I'd be wishing on all my options that Microsoft or Google would provide a nice exit strategy real quick like.

Speaking of 37signals, I've been using tadalist.com for a couple weeks, and it is okay but very bereft of features. I want to be able to create arbitrary hierarchies of tasks and set up email notification schedules unique for each task. I had hopes that rememberthemilk.com, which I learned of today, would satisfy. While being more flexible than tadalist.com (and while providing the same extra-casual writing voice that Google made cool, and is now being overused on every new "Web 2.0" site), still no hierarchies, and notifications are a global setting (haven't these guys ever used Outlook?). Guess I'll have to write my own web app for this -- should be trivial, especially given the expected load of 1 concurrent user!

Speaking of load, Thinkfree Office Online is having serious overload trouble: they were unavailable today for a while, and right now the site says downloads are temporarily suspended due to too much traffic. Come on guys, your applets rock, let them be all they can be and buy more bandwidth! Hopefully they will figure out how to translate this server-straining popularity into a practical business, because I want to keep using them.