• Extremely mild
• Richly foaming
• Naturally gentle
• Deeply cleanses
• Nourishes
• Pure and soothing
• Synergistically
• Refresh and restore
• Skin radiance
• Cool soothing
• Protects and restores balance
• Harmonize and replenish
• Additional moisturizing benefit

What doesn’t this stuff do? Lather up and this naturally gentle, richly foaming, pure and soothing nourishing cleanser will synergistically refresh, harmonize, replenish, protect and restore balance with cool soothing botanicals.

Kinda ridiculous, isn’t it? Reading this should remind you to read your own site, your own marketing copy, your own definitions.

What claims are you making? Do you really believe them? What are you saying? Does it make any sense? How are you describing your product? Is it accurate or just a sea of adjectives that look good and sound good together? What story are you telling or selling? Whatever it turns out to be, are you really OK with it? Deep down inside, is it something you’re proud of?

Today Basecamp turns 6. We launched Basecamp in February 2004 – here’s the original post on SvN that launched it all.

Stats

Birthday stats are always fun. Here are some of our favorites:

• 55,700,000 comments
• 53,000,000 megabytes of uploaded files (that’s 53 terabytes)
• 38,000,000 to-dos
• 24,600,000 messages
• 8,600,000 completed milestones
• 3,600,000 users
• 3,600,000 projects
• And for the technically minded: At peak we’re doing 220 requests a second with an average response time of 160ms.

These numbers are based on open accounts. We’re not counting cancelled accounts or deleted messages/comments/to-dos/files etc.

We’re thrilled with the growth over the last year. Thanks to everyone who uses Basecamp or any one of our products. We’ve got some great stuff in store for you this year so stay tuned!

REWORK is in stores March 9, 2010. Pre-order today from Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, and 800-CEO-READ.

We’re really having fun digging into all the useful things we can do now that our customers have 37signals IDs. The Launchpad is one of those playgrounds.

Last night we added deep links to Basecamp accounts. Deep links let you jump into an account without having to first log into the account and then choose where you want to go.

For example, deep links for Highrise let you jump right to your deals, cases, tags, tasks, or contacts. Deep links for Backpack let you jump right to your calendar, pages, reminders, or journal. And now deep links for Basecamp let you jump right to one of your five most recently accessed projects.

Here’s a video to show you how it all works:

A few weeks ago we posted about our new way of working. Small teams of three, two-week iterations, and two-month resets.

First iteration

For the first two-week iteration, Team Bravo took on a revamp of our customer forums. For a couple of years we’d been using forum software called Beast. It served its purpose well, but it was time for something better.

The forums were structured in the traditional way: They were separated by product and grouped into categories. There were forums for feature requests, troubleshooting, how-tos, etc. It worked well enough, but it really wasn’t a good match for the primary use of the forums: asking and answering questions.

We also didn’t have any formal spam protection on the forums so every day we had to go in manually and clean out spam. Plus, the anonymity of the forums led to the common devolution of discussion seen across anonymous forums across the net. We had to do better.

So Team Bravo pitched a total re-do. We accepted.

A change of direction

The early mockups for the revamped forum followed the structure of the old forum. Products and categories. We fell into the trap of redoing something by using the old as the guide for the new.

But a few days in we shifted directions and decided to structure the forums in more of a Q&A format and less of a “subject” and “body” format with the usual categories. 37signals Answers was born.

How it works

When you visit 37signals Answers you are shown a list of the products supported by Answers.

I ran across the following video player UIs in the past 24 hours.

Blip

ESPN

Flickr

Google Video

Justin.tv

Metacafe

MySpace

Quicktime

Ustream

Viddler

Vimeo

Yahoo Video

YouTube