Happy birthday Basecamp! Our flagship product celebrated its third anniversary yesterday. Here’s the original launch announcement made right here on Signal vs. Noise. And my, look how our baby has grown:

• Over 1,000,000 people have Basecamp accounts worldwide.
• 94% of customers surveyed said they would recommend Basecamp to a friend, client, or colleague.
• Great reviews from our customers and mentions in major publications.
• Integration with other great products like Blinksale, Harvest, Phonified, Project Recon for Windows XP, Dashboard widgets, and more.
• Big productivity boosts on Basecamp’s most popular feature: To-do lists.
• We just increased storage limits across the board (2x on the Personal, Basic, and Plus plan, 3x on the Premium plan, and 4x on the Max plan).

We’re constantly adding tweaks and improvements and have plans in 2007 to keep the improvements coming. Over 90% of all changes we make to Basecamp are based on customer requests so thanks for your feedback. And thanks to all our customers for helping make Basecamp’s success possible.

To help celebrate, here’s a coupon code for $10 off your next month when you upgrade: XYN58UA6F2.

Cell phone sound quality was bad enough, but now we accept further degradation introduced by bluetooth headsets.

CD-quality sound is being replaced by further downsampled downloadable digital music.

Now you can buy TV shows and movies online that are lower quality than the ones you can see for free on an actual TV.

Text messaging is introducing new lexicon that eschews punctuation and sentence structure for simply getting the point across.

YouTube brings pixelated motion to the masses.

Judging by quality, these products are getting better by “getting worse.” Convenience trumping quality is nothing new, but its pace seems accelerated these days.

Which companies do you see bucking this trend? Who is competing by delivering higher quality goods and services? Who is saying convenience is important, but it’s not the most important thing? What opportunities are out there for companies looking to differentiate through quality? Who is excelling by raising the bar on both convenience and quality?

Here’s how they do it.

We’re looking for Basecamp customers in the NYC or Chicagoland area interested in being interviewed for short on-site video vignettes demonstrating how you use Basecamp. We’ll be promoting these videos on our site.

We’re looking for customers from all walks of life and all industries. From educators to designers to writers to marketers to performers to lawyers to anyone who considers Basecamp an integral part of their business.

If you are interested in participating, or have any questions, send us an email. Thank you.

Michael Bierut elaborates on the similarities of graphic design and speechwriting for clients.

Your client has a message to communicate: an argument, a sales pitch, a call to action. Your job is to give it form. You’re an expert at this. You know how to take a complicated bunch of ideas and reduce them to their arresting, memorable, engaging essence. You come up with some big ideas that you’re convinced will work and, detail by careful detail, you bring those ideas to life. But there’s a problem: your work is second-guessed by a bunch of middle managers, some of whom are insecure, some of whom have their own agendas to inject, some of whom just like to say no. Despite all that, you refine and revise, hoping to keep the strength of your original idea intact. Finally, your work is approved, and it goes out into the world. If you’re lucky, it really makes a difference: minds are changed, passions are fueled, your client looks great. And, somehow, hardly anyone out there knows you were involved at all… It sounds a lot like graphic design, doesn’t it?

He goes on to reference some examples cited in Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution book about her time — and pressures — writing speeches for Ronald Reagan and H.W. Bush.

I particularly liked this backstage pass into the beautiful closing words of the Challenger Disaster speech Noonan wrote for Reagan:

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them — this morning, as they prepared fro their journey, and waved good-bye, and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”

Bierut adds:

A deluge of mail and calls followed. But does it surprise you to learn that during the attenuated review process, someone from the National Security Council suggested that that the end be changed — quoting, of all things, a then-popular AT&T commercial — to “reach out and touch someone?” Noonan described this as “the worst edit I received in all my time at the White House.”

Ahh, clients. To be fair, we’ve all been there—we’ve all thought we had a better solution to a problem than the people we hired to solve it. But it’s still funny.

An autistic woman produces a film about how she interacts with the world and then chimes in on the thread at Metafilter. [via as]

We’re very excited to welcome Jeremy Kemper to the 37signals team. He starts next week.

Jeremy is the #2 contributor to Ruby on Rails and has been around since the dawn of the framework.

Jeremy comes to us from CD Baby where he was responsible for rebuilding much of their infrastructure and assembling their Rails team.

We’ve had our eye on Jeremy for some time. Since the early days of Rails, he’s always stood out as an obvious hire. So it’s fantastic that we’ve finally been able to make it happen.

We’ve got some great stuff planned. It’s going to be a blast to be able to work with Jeremy to get these things into your hands (well, on to your screens).

Welcome aboard Jeremy!

We get this a lot: “How do you guys get so much done with such a small team? 5 products, a book, Rails, and a popular blog. We have a lot more money, people, hardware, and technology than you do, but we can’t seem to get anything done. What’s the secret?”

There are two prisoners. Each have their own cell and no cellmates.

Both want to break out. One has a jackhammer and the other a spoon.

The jackhammer is clearly the better tool to break though concrete, block, brick. But it’s loud, big, requires a power source, it’s expensive and hard to hide. You can’t be subtle with a jackhammer. Small mistakes become huge mistakes with a jackhammer. It’s all or nothing with a jackhammer. It’s handy if you are breaking up a concrete sidewalk, but breaking out of a concrete prison is another story.

The spoon is for eating soup. But it’s subtle, quiet, utilitarian, maneuverable, human powered, easy to conceal, easier to repair or replace. It may take a lot longer, but you stand a much better chance.

Brute force (jackhammer) may get things done, but a whole lot more can go wrong—loudly. Subtlety (spoon) gives you more room to work. More opportunities to say no, to slow down, to make better decisions along the way, to change direction.

Pouring tons of money, tons of resources, and tons of people at a problem is like using a jackhammer to break out of jail. Putting a few smart people on the problem, embracing constraints, not trying to solve the wrong problems, focusing on precision, not using seven words when four will do, and taking the time to get it done right is like using the spoon.

We use the spoon.

A few weeks ago our pal Andrew Huff from Chicago’s Gapers Block brought a few guys over to our office to give us a demo of some software they were working on. Andrew is handling their PR.

The guys were Atul Varma and Aza Raskin of Humanized — a small Chicago start-up focused on making desktop software simpler and less frustrating. They are sharp. Their philosophy is much like ours. We’re fans.

The demo we got was for a new product called Enso. It’s Windows only so they brought their laptops.

Enso is a launcher — much like Launchbar or Quicksilver on the Mac. Although Enso has some more tricks up its sleeve. Enso has a nice style about it too. It’s tastefully executed.

Hold down the caps lock key, type, and stuff happens. You can add up numbers, spell check a sentence, open a document, look something up with Google, get a word count of any block of text, define any word anytime, etc. They even demoed how it could work with Basecamp, although I don’t know if that feature made it into their final release.

Once you get the hang of it it’s probably something you can’t imagine being without. That’s how Launchbar is for me — when I use a Mac that doesn’t have Launchbar of Quicksilver I feel like I’m stuck in the past.

To start Enso comes in two parts: Launcher and Words. You can use them together or separately. Walt Mossberg wrote it up today in The Wall Street Journal. Not a bad way to launch.

If you have a PC, and you value your time and like to avoid frustrating common tasks, you should definitely check out Enso over at the Humanized site.

Etsy is looking for a Fulltime, permanent (get stock) Computer Engineers in Brooklyn, NY.

Sugar Creative is looking for a Junior to Mid-Level Web Developer in sunny Phoenix, AZ.

HQ Group is looking for a Righteous Rails Web Developer in San Diego or your couch.

Innovative Way is looking for a Web Developer (Multi-platform) in Plano, TX.

Astral Brands is looking for a Rails Programmer in Atlanta, GA.

Closer Look is looking for an Art Director (Interactive) in wonderful Chicago, IL.

PatientsLikeMe is looking for an User Interface Engineer in Cambridge, MA.

Fry, Inc. is looking for a Sr. Information Architect in Westmont, IL.

Ingram’s Magazine is looking for a Creative Web Designer in Kansas City, MO.

Ideapark is looking for an Experience Designer/Information Architect in Minneapolis, MN.

Where you post your job says a lot about your company and the kind of people you want to attract. Our Job Board attracts the best because it’s featured on industry-leading sites such as Signal vs. Noise, A List Apart, Zeldman.com, Kottke.org, and the Ruby on Rails site. The people who build the best of the web read these sites. People who value beautiful design, beautiful code, high standards, and doing great work. These are the people you’ll reach on the Job Board.