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August 8, 2007

The Fascination With ToDo Lists Continues

Michael Arrington

54 comments »

The amount of energy web entrepreneurs put into creating the perfect online ToDo list is surprising. In May 2006 we ran through a boatload of them in a comparison post. After all that entrepreneurial effort, you’d think the online ToDo list would have been perfected.

Apparently not. Now DabbleDB, a beautiful little database-centric application builder based in Vancouver, Canada, has created a bit of buzz around its own ToDo list application, built on the Facebook platform.

The app, called Dabble Do, uses the DabbleDB back end to create a simple ToDo list on Facebook. There are some bells and whistles. For example, for dates you simply type in “tomorrow” or “next Wednesday” and the app figures out what you mean. You can also set ToDo items for your Facebook friends and follow up by “cracking a whip.” It’s a good way to stay organized.

Will Facebook’ers use this to keep themselves organized? The email/messaging feature on Facebook is very popular (I wish I could just have it forward to my normal email, though). Perhaps adding other features of Outlook, like ToDo lists and calendars, will catch on, too. In my mind, though, social networking is very different from office-like organization applications. That’s why I wasn’t particularly excited when Zoho (an office suite) added their own Facebook application a few weeks ago. So I’m fairly tepid on Dabble Do.

The bloggers seem to like it, though, and I’ve been wrong more than once before. See Mathew Ingram, Read/Write Web, Paul Kedrosky (an investor), Donna Bogatin and others. Ah, I love the blogosphere.

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Comments

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  1. Churchill

    August 8th, 2007 at 3:46 am

    I’m in danger of sounding very old fashioned here, but isn’t a simple pen and paper much more straight forward in this situation? Seeing that the only person you are communicating with is yourself.

  2. David N. Welton

    August 8th, 2007 at 3:46 am

    The problem is that ToDo lists are a commodity at this point. I know from personal experience:

    http://stufftodo.dedasys.com/

  3. ram

    August 8th, 2007 at 4:14 am

    One fundamental thing with the todo lists they are a heckle to maintain.
    I first need to make a list, then update it. And to do all this i need to log and also be connected.

    Do I have a mobile based solution. I can access it using my mobile?

  4. CouchTycoon

    August 8th, 2007 at 4:54 am

    Well, in some cases it´s nearly half the time to do the task instead of organising the task in a to do list. however rememberthemilk is one of the best sites i know and i´m using collaborative with colleagues - also mobile!

  5. Mayank

    August 8th, 2007 at 5:06 am

    The one I really like is http://todoist.com. It’s fast, really simple, comes with some bells and whistles like using ‘Today’, ‘Next friday’ etc., and has multiple lists and sub-lists. I can browse this list using my Nokia E61 and it works great.

    For the office, My Nokia E61 syncs with my Lotus Notes and my to-do lists in my Nokia are syncd automatically.

    Get’s the job done.

  6. Zach Allia

    August 8th, 2007 at 5:10 am

    There are plenty of other To Do Lists on facebook already that are much simpler and have 15k + users… this isn’t some sort of new idea.. people like it but they don’t really seem to care for complexity.

  7. Chris Cardinal

    August 8th, 2007 at 5:34 am

    I think there’s a place for ToDo lists, but I’m not sure why there are so many competitors and yet such little variance between them…

  8. Jason Alba

    August 8th, 2007 at 6:11 am

    stuff to do today:

    - Look at my list from yesterday, keep working on it
    - evaluate my to do list strategy, compare products to use to manage it
    - keep doing stuff that I haven’t done in prior days, catching up on my to do lists
    - …
    - …

    Jason Alba
    CEO - JibberJobber.com
    :: managing career contacts ::

  9. jccodez

    August 8th, 2007 at 6:45 am

    just use notepad….if the task takes more than a few minutes…web todo is waaayyyy overkill…

  10. Michael Vu

    August 8th, 2007 at 6:53 am

    Good idea, but I’m not so sure I want to use Facebook to manage my to-do items.

  11. Doeboy

    August 8th, 2007 at 7:07 am

    *********************
    Time for your daily dosage of Facebook press on TechCrunch, open up….

  12. James Thomas

    August 8th, 2007 at 7:27 am

    Like I said before… Facebook works far better as free advertising than it does as an application platform.

    Once again, though, that makes us the little guys. ;)

  13. Rashid

    August 8th, 2007 at 7:40 am

    This would be nice if you could get reminders on your cell phone through sms whenever you have to do something.

  14. Andrew Pass

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:08 am

    Just hold on a second please. I’ve got to make a note on my to do list to complete my to do list.

  15. Andy

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    rememberthemilk is way ahead of the pack.

  16. Jordan Mitchell

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:19 am

    I keep a list in Notepad on my laptop. It’s on my desktop, so quickly available (though usually open anyway), and it’s always synced with my PDA/phone. I keep delegated todo items on there too, but don’t really care how the delegates manage the todo items (as long as they get done). Works for me.

    Anything more involved (a project with multiple interdependent tasks) and we use online collaboration sites/software.

    I don’t sense there’s a market opportunity for anything in between.

  17. Saagar

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:31 am

    Pretty good idea indeed, to-do lists are one of the subsidiaries of GTD and anything based on GTD is bound to become a hit because, as people face a lot more things to complete with the time remaining the same 24 hours a day, they definitely need a platform to get their things done on time… Here is my personal take on GTD

  18. Narendra

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:33 am

    30 Boxes calendar success in facebook would have me believe that FBers can get behind a little organization. I think there will be an uptick in the Fall as well for the college set.

  19. Ian

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:41 am

    Another vote for notepad or pen/paper.

  20. Sridhar Vembu

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:47 am

    Mike,
    To a great extent, at Zoho, we are in the experiment-and-learn phase in Facebook. I don’t know if productivity apps are a good fit on FB or not, but we want to find out by trying. And the ideas we learn from working in that environment are quite useful in other contexts.

    Sridhar

  21. EH

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:50 am

    worthless if not seamlessly portable.

  22. Andrew Catton

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:05 am

    Thanks for the writeup, Mike. Don’t worry, we’re not targeting office organization with Dabble Do (though we do end up using Dabble Do that way ourselves, we’re a little.. cough.. biased). This is meant as more of a fun, yet still useful way for friends to communicate. We’re explicitly trying to go beyond our usual Dabble DB business user crowd.

    To all you notepadders and pen/paper people: I totally agree for personal todo lists (and would add whiteboards to that list). The web is absolutely overkill for a simple list. The thing those tools don’t do is facilitate communication between people wherever they are, a natural for the web. Think of it is an extremely lightweight project management tool for regular people, where the “project” is ordinary day-to-day life.

    I guess the best thing I can say is give it a shot — tell a friend to bring back that book he borrowed 4 months ago, and crack the whip on him every day until he does. Satisfying and useful :)

  23. whoopie

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:07 am

    setting to-do’s for fb friends? that looks like a great way to get to the point of not having friends. yes, this is just want i want out of facebook, some idiot creating a list of things for me to do

  24. Toby

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:08 am

    Everybody is so keen on web based task lists? What’s the deal? What’s wrong with all of the desktop solutions? …not trendy enough?

    I use JetTask. It keeps my task list private and is far more responsive then ANY website. Better then pen and paper? …that’s a tough one.

  25. Hasan Luongo

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:11 am

    Mike you mentioned that you would rather have the messages sent directly to your eMail box, there is a cool facebook app by the guys at Xobni that does just that, here’s the link:

    http://www.xobni.com/blog/2007.....-facebook/

    cheers.

  26. mathew johnson

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:19 am

    morten lund wrote on his blog that he just uses google spreadsheets for a todo list, if it’s good enough for him . . .

  27. EH

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:21 am

    jettask: worthless without dependencies and hierarchy.

    seems this space is going to wallow in novelty until someone jumps the…what’s the good thing to jump, opposite of shark?…until someone jumps the whatever and makes something that includes the parts of microsoft project that people want, rather than the bling on a paper pad that’s being created these days.

  28. The Buxr Widget

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:22 am

    Your right Mike. Logging into a social network to check a todo list is just not natural.

  29. Jake

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:26 am

    Most online to-do lists are pretty simple. They just record the task, the duedate and maybe the priority. If you want a real project manager with folders, time tracking, the ability to collaborate with others, mobile phone support, GTD support, and much much more, you need to check out a more advanced task manager like http://www.Toodledo.com

  30. John

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:34 am

    I like this site Phondoo.com for managing my to-do list on my Google homepage-

    http://phondoo.com

  31. Andrew

    August 8th, 2007 at 10:16 am

    I prefer to do just keep an open text file open and work with that…faster to access it, and I can always keep it open

  32. Mark Hurst

    August 8th, 2007 at 10:21 am

    No mention of Gootodo, for shame :)

  33. Ryan

    August 8th, 2007 at 10:40 am

    For me it has to be GTDInbox, which puts GTD task management into Gmail itself. Since I spend all day in Gmail, and incoming email creates a lot of my tasks it works for me.

  34. Alaska Miller

    August 8th, 2007 at 10:42 am

    A serious question Michael: How much do you use Facebook yourself? I get a sense that you use it for communication on some level, but how deeply is it integrated into your life? Do you ping and poke others? Do you leave wall posts? Do you tag photos? Do you use the music apps?

    And:

    Does Facebook replace your plethora of other activities? Do you use it a blogging software? Do you use it as an email client? Do you use it for files sharing and downloading? Do you use it as a news reader?

  35. HelluvaJob.com

    August 8th, 2007 at 10:45 am

    I agree with #1

  36. anuj

    August 8th, 2007 at 10:48 am

    We don’t work alone we work in teams. The stress comes from sending back and forth emails/IM between team members to keep track of tasks.

    for larger projects we use project management. For smaller queue of tasks in a team setting there arent many solutions. This product seems it could do that.

    At MangoSpring(www.mangospring.com) we needed a similar shared to do list couldnt find a free online version and decided to make one ourselves. You can access it at http://www.taskbin.com.

    And yeah I agree there are far too many to do lists :-) ours included.

  37. David Blume

    August 8th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    I found that the most productive task list for me provides one item, the thing I should be doing. There shouldn’t be anything else on the screen. It certainly shouldn’t be part of a(n otherwise distracting) portal or landing page.

    http://task.dlma.com

  38. antirez

    August 8th, 2007 at 11:23 am

    I’m trying to build one with an integrated calendar and a slim UI design, the main point is sharing and working together: http://tudulist.com

  39. Rajesh Shakya

    August 8th, 2007 at 11:37 am

    Facebook has shown a lot of promises. Innovation is the limit, developers can build any applications around facebook now.

    Rajesh Shakya
    http://www.rajeshshakya.com
    Helping technopreneurs to excel and lead their life!

  40. david

    August 8th, 2007 at 11:43 am

    Gubb does this better than anyone I have seen. Check out http://www.gubb.com

  41. Nigel

    August 8th, 2007 at 2:05 pm

    I was going to leave a bland empty comment as an excuse to have a signature that plugs my own wannabe site, which seems de rigeur on these pages. I think I can do the bland empty comment bit pretty well, but I’m stuck on having a web 0.2 site to promote. Maybe someone could come up with a service for disposable web sites to bandy around, a bit like the disposable email address services. A white label website generator.

  42. Peter Armstrong

    August 8th, 2007 at 2:39 pm

    Heh, here’s my wannabe todo list: http://pomodo.com/

    It’s built in Flex, uses Rails on the server and is MIT licensed.

    No, it’s not a real product: it’s the example from my beta book Flexible Rails (http://flexiblerails.com/). However, it is probably as capable as many of the todo lists out there that are pretending to be real products. Plus, I have fake quotes from Michael Arrington and Om Malik — what could be better :)

  43. KingJacob

    August 8th, 2007 at 2:48 pm

    why not stop wasting your time on building and using fancy to do lists and just use a yellow memo pad like sane people?

  44. andERigs

    August 8th, 2007 at 4:25 pm

    I think there is a place for outlook type functionality in a social networking platform. Otherwise we wouldn’t have invented http://www.relopia.com ;-)
    The whole purpose of social networking is communication - or? And why limit the communication to the people who happen to be registered??
    Thats why I agree with the comment regarding turning facebook communication into email.
    Or better still come and join relopia! ;-)))

  45. Michael Arrington

    August 8th, 2007 at 5:16 pm

    Alaska - I’d say I log into facebook 2-3x per day to add friends, test applications, etc. I’d say it has definitely become part of my life.

  46. David Mackey

    August 8th, 2007 at 5:32 pm

    The problem with all these little web apps. is simply that - there are a multitude of them to choose from and you need a multitude to make a “suite”. I need more centralized solutions. No time to surf all over the web attempting to accomplish tasks.

  47. leah

    August 9th, 2007 at 5:15 am

    Soon there will be a Facebook filter through which I can eat and breathe. Today’s Mumbo Gumbo comic is on this topic:

    http://www.itgumbo.com/mumbogu.....more_1.php

  48. ravi karandeekar

    August 9th, 2007 at 7:49 am

    i like the idea of maintaining a “to do” list. New products make it more interesting.

  49. Tom Colvin

    August 13th, 2007 at 7:35 am

    For me, simple ToDo lists take too much time with too little payback. I prefer VitaList, based on the GTD model. It also has a widget that can show your tasks on your Google or NetVibes homepage.

  50. Justus

    August 18th, 2007 at 9:16 pm

    hi nice post, i enjoyed it

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