Project management and Google Apps Marketplace

Also, Google Apps Marketplace has just come into play. They’ve put a compelling new twist on the relatively-new-itself “app store” idea. Now, whenever I think “I need an online service that does [insert ingenious time-saving mechanism here],” I going straight to Marketplace.

I did a search for “project management”, and came up with a list of options — some free, some not. (Mind Meister Mind Mapping, recommended recently by a friend, was in there.) Then I saw the “Project Management” category in the navbar, which oddly came up with a differently sorted list with some different items.

Marketplace is interesting. The obvious immediate upside is “single sign-on,” i.e. signing into any of the listed services with your Google Apps login (in your case, the sitenb.com ID). They also list the benefit of “Google’s universal navigation.” I am definitely looking forward to imposing a consistent, extensible look between my cloud-based application — but I don’t know if that’s what “universal navigation” means yet.

I’ll admit I’ve had some problems getting a couple to work, especially with existing accounts at the respective services like Freshbooks. But I think it’s gonna be cool. By the way, I’m starting to see that Chrome should become one’s centre for all of this software-as-service, online app, cloud-tastic, web-2 stuff. Now I do all my research and reading in Safari, and all my mail, docs, invoicing, task management, and dish washing in Chrome. It’s just so springy!