RSS, which gained early acceptance as a syndication format for news, now is being used to syndicate content of all types. Photos, videos, events, blogs, news, music – if available online, there is probably an example of someone syndicating it using RSS.

Recently, 37signals spun off the to-do list functionality from their excellent basecamp product. The new service allows anyone to create and share to-do lists easily and for free. Syndicating to-do lists using RSS is not a new concept, however 37signals has refined the idea and offered a service that is intuitive. Head over to Ta-da list, and create a to-do list for your project.

The ta-da list service allows you to share your list privately, or publically. For distributed teams, who are constantly communicating daily or weekly tasks, ta-da list is a good first step. By subscribing to the project to-do RSS feed, team memebers can be alerted via the Windows system tray whenever anyone adds a new task.

37signals demonstrates excellent user interface design in their products, and they consistently manage to boil complex requirements to the most simple necessities. I look forward to seeing what they release next.

As an aside – if having your project to-dos hosted externally is an issue, integrating similar functionality into your existing project management platform is most likely straightforward given the wealth of freely available RSS tools.