Ben Brooks has a clever speculation that Google+ could grow into a project management and group collaboration tool:
You wrap integration with Google+ into everyone of those and you have a powerful project management system that goes beyond the walls of a ‘company’. Say you are working on project X, a website redesign with a group of people both internal to your company and external.
You create one circle for that project, collaborate on documents in Gdocs, email with Gmail, meetings with Gcal, A/B test result sharing with Analytics, and so on… That could be very big.
The biggest hurdle to group project management software is that it’s not email.
People default to email. This is one reason why Basecamp is so great: it has fantastic email-related features. You don’t always have to log in and use it to be a part of the conversation within Basecamp.
My team and I used Basecamp as our internal project management software for the three years I was marketing director at the International House of Prayer, and it was a lifesaver. There’s no way my internal team could have gotten by without it. But, Basecamp would often break down outside the walls of our office. The times when we did need our internal clients to log in so they could review some proofs or comment on a recent revision they were always forgetting their login credentials.
This is where I could see Google+ having the capability to do group collaboration and project management. It may never go toe to toe with Basecamp and its features, but I could see Google+ being very useful and adaptable.