Manymoon, Staction and Posterous: Workstreaming

I found myself wanting to like Manymoon, a new project manager app that touts itself as the ‘first social project management tool’, but try as I might, I don’t like it.

Manymoon | Project | manymoon, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The idea of a stream of project-related updates and items is a good one — I used this premise in the design of Workstreamer several years ago — but Manymoon maintains too many of the silos of old-school project management apps, where tasks, milestones, and files are managed underneath separate tabs, for example, in a very Basecampish way.

Along with this lumpishness, the app is subtly ugly. There are too many sort of navigation controls and tabs, so that too much time is spent clicking on things.

There doesn’t seem to be anything new in Manymoon. Even standards like RSS feeds are missing, and there isn’t something radically different to replace it, like a well-design Twitter interface or an Adobe Air client (again, something designed in Workstreamer years ago).

Today, I am happily using Staction, a wonderfully small and tight project manager application from the folks at Paste Interactive (see Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming and Staction: Starting To Knock Down My Objections) which is well-designed, simple to use, and which provides RSS feeds for all project streams.

What Staction lacks is large format blogging as an adjunct to project management, and for that I am using the new private blogging features of Posterous, which I will be writing about soon.

I find that creating a Staction project and a Posterous private blog for a complex project may be the right approach: they complement each other in obvious ways, while staying out of each others way for very different sorts of posts. This is the project work analog of public blogging and Twitter use, where long form, slow-twitch blogging leads to links pushed through the short form, fast-twitch bloodstream of Twitter.

I just wish that one or both of the two apps — Staction and Posterous — offered up integration, like automatically creating a project-tagged post in Staction with a link back to Posterous for every long-form post made in a project blog.