Five free Web apps we can't live without

Honorable mention

Basecamp
37signals LLC's Basecamp project management tool is a slick application. We haven't yet used it here at the Computerworld.com newsroom to track a real project, although we're expecting to try it out later this year. But a colleague at one of our sister Web sites reports that his team of editors regularly uses a commercial Basecamp account to track major feature stories as they wind their way through the assignment, writing, editing and design phases.

Basecamp combines collaboration with project-tracking tools such as to-do lists, milestones and writeboards (private wikis with comments). It definitely keeps to the Rails philosophy that favors elegance over feature bloat -- Basecamp does a few things, not a massive number. Although it has a limited amount of features, Basecamp comes with a sleek, easy-to-figure-out user interface designed for companies trying to entice external clients to use the system.

Google Calendar
I've seen slicker, more capable calendar interfaces out there. But I can't seem to break my Google Calendar habit.

I doubt I'm using it the way it's intended. I keep track of interesting events, even if I'm not planning to attend, so that others can see them as well. It's easy to embed the calendar onto my personal Web page or invite a friend to an event, so I don't have to try to remember that there's a lecture at the local Audubon nature area two months after reading about it in a newsletter, one that I don't want to put in my PalmPilot yet because I'm not sure I'm going.

My features wish list would include natural language date entry -- 30boxes.com, among others, has that capability now -- as well as autocomplete from a list of prior "Where" entries (so I don't have to type in "Garden in the Woods, Framingham, Mass." a zillion times). A little less structure might be nice as well, such as not requiring ending times (how do I know how long a concert will last?).

Still, after test-driving other online calendar services, I keep coming back to Google's as a reasonably easy, quick and functional interface.

Carbonite
My paranoid self battled my pessimistic self for quite some time over the idea of an online backup service for my at-home PC. Should I worry more about my data being hacked at an off-site backup service or about the possibility of a lightning strike/power surge wiping out both my desktop and networked backup drive?

In the end, the fear of hard drive disaster won out. Mostly. I've signed up for the Carbonite automated backup service, although I exclude sensitive files like tax returns and other financial material. (They go on CD to a bank safe deposit box. I said I was paranoid.)

What's great about Carbonite is how easy it is to back up files. Once I signed up, downloaded the software and selected what I wanted backed up, Carbonite did the rest. It automatically runs in the background, saving whatever files I've added or altered as long as they're in directories I've asked to be mirrored.

The data is encrypted on Carbonite's servers, although I don't get my own private key. (I'd initially opted for another service that does offer private encryption keys, but I got ticked off when no one answered a presignup question -- even after I got a help desk survey asking about the response and answered that no one had helped me yet.)

What's less great is that the initial backup takes many days for a decent-size hard drive, even with a high-speed, fiber-optic Internet connection. And the only way to restore files is over the Internet in a process that can also take days; there's no option to pay for overnight delivery of data DVDs in an emergency. Still, at $50/year to back up one hard drive of unlimited size, Carbonite is affordable extra insurance in case of data disaster (although I'm still doing at-home backups as well).

So, can Web apps replace the desktop?
I'm not prepared to give up most of my desktop applications just yet. I'll need longer experience before I'm convinced of availability and uptime, responsiveness and security. In some cases, I still want some way of working with my own data on my own system; in other cases (Excel), the Web apps don't yet match the power of the desktop.

But Web applications have come a long way in just a year or two. They'll no doubt become even more powerful in the coming months, and they'll be more enticing as alternatives to locally hosted software.

Did we miss your favorite Web-based application? Do you have thoughts on the ones we've named? Please post your comments below.

Sharon Machlis is Computerworld's online managing editor.

Web apps we can't live without:
The A-list Ta-da List PBwiki Google Docs		Bloglines v3 beta Zoho Creator		Honorable mention Basecamp Google Calendar Carbonite