Basecamp has become the certerpiece of Corante project management (yes, I know it all seems so wonderfully extemporaneous, but we do try to keep tabs on our projects), but I can't seem to convince the nice folks who built it that there are things that need to be added. One of the problems of success is that you start to believe you are smart rather than lucky. Note that as the survivor of a brain aneurysm, all such illusions have been dashed for me.

I have been hoping that I could find a small web-based tool that would allow me to define arbitrary lists of data, so I could create more that the messages, to-dos, and milestones provided by Basecamp.

Somehow, today, I stumbled upon Sproutliner, which seems to fit the bill.

But the use of these RSS producing social tools starts me to thinking about integration. Sure I can post a link to a Sproutliner list in a Basecamp project, but what I want, and expect to see, frankly, is a mechanism to connect RSS feeds. For example, to be able to create a subscription to a Sproutliner RSS feed (coming in Pro!) in a Basecamp project, and have that framed into the project overview in some controllable way.

This is just a specialized case of reblogging, but the solutions that require some server side scripting are annoying. These tool makers should be developing the gasketry to allow us to tickertoy more complex solutions out of simpler components, using RSS as the glue.