http://www.rememberthemilk.com/

Now
that I’ve seen these guys mentioned a few times, and I’ve had a chance
to try them out, I can say that I’m pleasantly satisfied with this
service, though it did leave me wanting just a little bit more.

Now, before anybody goes all purist and “KISS”
on me… I do believe less is more, and I hate Office for it’s feature
bloat. To be honest, there are quite a few applications out there (and
not just desktop ones, I mean some Web 1.0/1.1 applications too) that
are just too feature rich to be useful. I subscribe very much to the
Web 2.0 mashup thinking as well as the SOA line of thinking where
customized “applications” are merely just mashups of many smaller
miniature applications.

However, I do believe in having at least a little bit of power in these
miniature applications. For example, the name “Remember the Milk”
indicates that these guys were thinking of the paradigm of “shopping
lists”, or, at very least “honey-do” lists, not just simple and
unstructured to-do lists. Why then, would they not have specific
functionality to add a List of items in a way that’s more obvious than
adding a Note to the to-do item? Would it not make sense to have a
simple way to add basic styles of attachments to a to-do item that were
interpreted in very basic, but powerful ways? I mean, what if I wanted
to have some automated process send a web-page to me for future review
or study? I could send a link in a Note, but would it be obvious what
that to-do item was for? Or would I have to then go into the item and
personally interpret the intent of the to-do item.

Another thing I think they could improve upon, although I know that
there are other, probably more appropriate services for this, is group
sharing of to-do lists. Now, I’ve only done basic research into RTM,
but it was not obvious to me how to accomplish such tasks as having a
team of people be in charge of a set of tasks, or how to share a task
with the ability to determine the level of security associated with
that task.

Overall, I am impressed with the service and I hope they continue to
move forward and make improvements. Considering that Google Calendar
does not have tasks built-in yet, even though they’ve been talking
about it since they first released it into beta, and considering that RTM
has already designed a way to integrate the two… they make a very
powerful combination already. There’s more work that I think can be
done, though, and I look forward to seeing the results. Maybe I can
even participate in the engineering process somehow…