We’ve been customers of 37signals – users of their fine Basecamp project management system – for almost four years, which is almost as long as it’s been around. One thing I’ve always liked about Basecamp, and a big part of why I’ve been willing to pay fifty bucks a month for so long now, is the fact that they don’t market to my clients. I like using an unbranded URL, in my case needmore.clientsection.com. And I like the fact that nowhere on the screen is a pitch for their product. This is very important to me, because I don’t want my clients to be distracted by anything while getting a project done.

Unfortunately, this all changed out of the blue a few days ago. With no notice, 37signals announced that they were changing their policy, and that over time all plans would use the same branded URL, and as far as I could tell, they were going to advertise their product in my page footer. In fact, until this change, there was a reassuring message in the footer, beside the link to their product, informing me that this footer would not be shown to my clients. That message is now gone.

Here is some of the reasoning behind this change, according to 37signals.

Initially we thought it would be important to hide the Basecamp brand name because, at the time, we (37signals) were still primarily a web design company. Basecamp was just a side project back then. We worried that competing web design firms would hesitate to use our Basecamp product if they thought their clients could easily trace Basecamp back to 37signals — a company that also designed web sites.

Would these web design companies think we’d use Basecamp as a conduit to pitch their clients on our own web design services? We’d never do that, and never did, but we wanted to do everything we could to assure them we weren’t interested in selling their clients on competing web development services. Hiding the “Basecamp” brand name and basecamphq.com domain name was the best way we could think of to shield 37signals from their clients.

They also sneak in a confession of what I had suspected right away:

…the brand name “Basecamp” will appear in a few places it didn’t before. A small Basecamp logo will also be visible to all users at the bottom of the screen.

While I appreciate an explanation, I respectfully disagree. In fact, it had never occurred to me that 37signals would try to steal our clients, not at all. Rather, I appreciated that since I was willing to pay for this service, they were willing to forego advertising to my clients in any way at all. It’s not about their design services, it’s about the impression that our customers were using software that was running on our server (though it wasn’t), provided by and supported by us (which it was). If one of our clients has a problem with Basecamp, they don’t go to 37signals, they come to us.

Over the years, we’ve spent a hell of a lot of time explaining why they couldn’t respond by email to a message, for example, while 37signals insisted that this wasn’t a problem. It was, it was a huge problem (since remedied, after years of pestering by their users), but 37signals didn’t know how bad the situation was because they don’t support the product, as far as our clients are concerned.

That is why we resent this change in policy. Basecamp is the type of system that you invest lots of time and effort in, over time. It runs on someone else’s servers, so you trust them to behave in a reasonable manner, and hopefully keep the general direction and policy of the service intact. This strikes me as a fairly big change in that direction and policy. I understand that things change, but not only were customers provided no advance notice, but none of their blogs nor help forums mention the change. It is only a notice that was shown to me when I logged in one day, and now it’s gone. While writing this post, I had difficulty even finding their original information to reference. I think this betrays the fact that they realize this isn’t a very cool thing to do, and they feel a bit guilty.

If 37signals really did care what their users thought about this change, they would have posted the message on their blog, or on their forum. They would invite discussion, rather than simply provide an email address for comments. They might have suggested the change beforehand, and asked for feedback from their loyal customers. They did none of these things, and I suspect it’s because they know people are going to be unhappy about it.

This is no way to treat your customers.

I’ve been using RSS news readers for quite a long time. And I’ve probably tried at least a dozen different pieces of software for this task. And like many folks these days, I eventually settled on Google Reader.

I did not, at first, think that I would like Reader. It’s not-very-pretty, in the typical Google fashion, and until you learn some keyboard shortcuts it can be a bit clunky. Given the choice between a desktop app and a web-based app, I’ll often prefer the native Mac OS X desktop app because it’s typically faster, better designed, and integrates well with the rest of my setup. But Reader has solved virtually all of those problems for me. And while I haven’t seen any numbers, it seems to me that it went from obscurity to market dominance with almost no fanfare at all.

There are many features in Reader that would be difficult or impossible with a desktop application. I can share articles with Kandace or other friends, find out what she recommends that I read, and of course it doesn’t matter what computer I’m at – everything stays in sync automatically. And I really like their Featured Reading Lists, which let you see what other prominent writers and thinkers are reading, and subscribe to them yourself.

Finally, it has a great iPhone interface. You can do pretty much everything with your iPhone, and they keep it simple and well-designed, not to mention that it stays in sync. I personally also use an iPhone app called Newsstand, which integrates perfectly with Reader and adds its own twist to the interface, but that’s just me. I’m a sucker for those cute iPhone apps.

If you read a lot on the web, I recommend giving Google Reader a try, if you haven’t already.

Improving the search engine raking for the Needmore website has long been on my to-do list. But when you’re keeping quite busy with projects, it tends to fall by the wayside. It’s hard to set aside time for something that doesn’t actually seem necessary, and that’s probably a good thing.

Last week, Google sent us a $100 coupon for AdWords. I’ve been meaning to run a campaign, so I decided to give it a try, putting in some keywords I thought would bring interested folks to Needmore. My first choices were “modern websites” and “modern web design,” so I added those keywords first and started doing some searches to see what else might be helpful.

The only trouble is that we already show up on the first page of search results for both of those terms. This came as quite a surprise to me because I had not yet taken any time to worry about our search engine raking. I know Kandace has done a bit of work on that in the past, but neither of us has looked into it recently.

So I went ahead and set up the campaign. But it doesn’t appear that it’s going to do us any good, since we’re already showing up for free in the places we really want to.

The lesson? Make sure your content is interesting, topical, and up to date, and you won’t have to worry too much about SEO.

After every holiday or family gathering, I become a bit reflective about the digital lives we’re leading. Very often, half of the folks at these gathering have photo or video cameras, and are going to great pains to get picture after picture. And despite promises to the contrary, I usually never see those photos again. In fact, I’ve become concerned about what happens to them at all.

Most people run Windows, and I’m not sure but I would imagine that most people use whatever software comes with Windows to handle their pictures and movies. They might also use whatever happened to come with a recent camera purchase, if they installed software off the CD. And therefore each person may have a slightly different configuration. But since most people are what I would call “novice” with their computers, when their computer inevitably fails, I would imagine that the chances are very good that they’ve lost all of their media. I consider the state of affairs on Windows to almost be a sort of “media prison,” and I don’t think most folks have much of a grasp on the situation.

It’s a little easier on a Mac, if only because there’s really only one commonly used application for managing your pictures: iPhoto. The same is true for your videos, with iMovie. The format is standard, and with iPhoto it appears as a single folder on your computer. This is so convenient it’s hard to understate, because I can move a pocket-sized hard drive from computer to computer, and keep everything with me. I can sit at any Mac in the world, and open my iPhoto library, complete with information like photo locations and which faces belong to which person. That also makes it a snap to back up.

Some people seem inclined to keep every photo they’ve ever taken on their memory card, but this can’t end much better. I just recently had a memory card fail on me, and lost a day’s worth of video. Very disappointing, but it could have been a lot worse. Although storage has gotten pretty good, I think it’s still safe to say that’s not a good way to keep your pictures.

For me, a bigger fear is just losing the media I have right now. Keeping my iPhoto library on a single hard drive is not a safe bet. You need to think about keeping a backup in at least one place, which I do. But I’m still a bit paranoid because both the hard drive and the backup are often in the same physical location, which is usually my house. So if there was a fire or even vandalism, I could well lose it all. This isn’t likely to happen to a box of old photos, which may or may not survive a fire, but are highly unlikely to be stolen.

So where does this leave me? With the same advice I give everyone: keep backups. No matter who you are, you should keep at least one full backup of your computer. I can’t recommend software for Windows because I don’t use it, but for my Mac I’ve been extremely happy with SuperDuper. There are plenty of good online solutions, though at the moment we’ve settled on DropBox because it not only backs up, but keeps several computers in sync.

Whatever method you choose, follow it well. It will save you one day, and believe me, your media is worth it.

All this month, Maria Kalman’s blog art about Benjamin Franklin at the New York Times has been making the rounds. So you may well have already seen it, but even so, it’s well worth taking more than one look at.