Writely Worth A Look

The flood of “Web 2.0 / Ajax” applications fails to abate, but the first wave of “obvious” applications crashed ashore about two years ago. The interesting ones have been either lionized as success stories (e.g., 37signals’ Basecamp, Backpack, Ta-Da Lists, and now Campfire) or absorbed by entities with fat wallets (e.g., Yahoo’s acquiring Oddpost’s rich e-mail client).

If you haven’t had a look at an on-line document editing solution, you might want to take the time to look at Writely. Aquired by Google six months ago, and still “62% beta”, it’s slowly being merged into the Google infrastructure. Soon you’ll be able to log in using your Google account.

Writely boasts a variety of nice features for personal or group use. Besides simple, clean rich document editing features, it makes it easy to share documents, post them to your blog (such as this one), or collaborate “live” (e.g., collaboratively collect notes during a business meeting).

Being owned by Google doesn’t give privacy advocates or employees much comfort about the disposition of their documents (the “revisions” feature and background autosaves should give Chinese dissidents or Enron 2.0 executives nightmares) and the thought of posting sensitive company information to a publically accessible site should cause you to pause. But the application is well-executed and allows you to do things that you couldn’t do with Microsoft Word. It’s worth a look.