Apparently David Heinemeier Hansson will settle for nothing less than world domination. With the launch of Ta-da List, he’s sprung yet another Rails-based application on the world. I only just got around to looking at Flickr (also based on Rails, methinks) this past weekend and here comes a new toy to play with.

At first it wasn’t clear to me how (or if) Ta-da List is significantly different from 43 Things, a different Rails-based web site that I’ve written about earlier. Ta-da List is a subset of Basecamp, the project management system from 37signals, and it’s clear from the web site that a significant motivation behind providing Ta-da List as a free service is to advertise for the more powerful capabilities found in Basecamp.

After a little more investigation, however, it looks like Ta-da List is simply an application for maintaining lists of things. Not that that’s a bad thing: it’s just different from what I see in 43 Things, which is more of a platform for social networking. With Ta-da List, you can maintain more than one list (e.g. “Things to do today”, “Books to read”, “People to kill”) and a given list can be publicly shared (viewable by all), privately shared (viewable and editable only by invitation) or a combination of the two (anyone can see it; only you and designated others can edit it). There are of course some nice touches that you appreciate but don’t always expect, like per-list RSS feeds.

I have the feeling that I’ll come to really like this service for the same reason that I like del.icio.us. Putting the “social” aspect of del.icio.us aside, it finally gives me a way to access my bookmarks from any computer I’m sitting in front of; no more of this maintaining one set of bookmarks in Firefox at work, but a different set of bookmarks in Safari at home. In the same way, I think Ta-da List has the same potential to help me keep all of my little lists no further away than the nearest Internet connection, which would be swell since I never did get the PDA bug like so many of my friends and co-workers have.