Writely

Is Writely, an online collaborative writing environment, part of the Internet's new frontier? Some say it represents a second generation of web-enabled technologies, the so-called Web 2.0 spectrum of products. Developer Upstartle released Writely in August 2005 and has since signed up several thousand users.

Mountainview, California based search company Google decided that the Writely product and its small team of developers were ideal candidates to become another brick in the Google corporate structure. In early March it bought the Writely Internet site and its underlying technology, its longer term goal to turn the still-in-beta product into a competitor for Microsoft Office.

Legal issues not withstanding on a variety of fronts (cooperation with the United States government on search data, click fraud with its AdSense program, censorship developments in China), Google seems hell bent on building a corporate juggernaut that can go toe to toe with Microsoft, the company that continues to generate profits on the order of US $1 billion per month, primarily from its server and Office products.

If you haven't yet experienced the Writely environment you may be in for a bit of wait. Google was badly stung when it released its Analytics product in December, after a similar corporate takeover. The search company simply couldn't handle the stampede for free Analytics accounts and some three months later is still unable to say when it will fulfill its initial promises of up to 50 free site statistics sets. Users who managed to get in the door before unfettered access was shut down are still limited to five such accounts as this column is written.

And speaking of writing, this text is being generated in a Writely session. The experience is surprisingly smooth, with only the barest of lag between keystroke and the appearance of text on the screen.

Writely is remarkably full-featured, with around 20 fonts, the usual word smithing tools of the trade (text appearance, alignment, bullets, cut, copy and paste, sub and super scripts, paragraph formatting, to name a few) and saving options for PDF, Word, RTF and OpenOffice. But don't go looking for a thesaurus, tables, a draw toolbar and a host of features you may be used to in your favourite commercial word processor. You won't find them. Find and replace is supported but it is quirky in that it only handles a "replace all."

No page layout view, no rulers, no tab stops either.

No, this is still a word processor alright, but a stripped down version of what you may presently be used to. Face it though, you probably only use a tiny fraction of the features in say Microsoft Word or Word Perfect and much of what you do use is probably in Writely's repertoire.

Its real strength though may not be in the features list but in its ability to support document collaboration. If you want to work with a colleague on a document, go ahead. Click on the collaborate button, enter an e-mail address and as soon as the recipient logs in he or she can begin editing the same document as the one you are working on. In short, two of you can work together on the same document.

In fact I'm writing this document while logged on under different names on two computers. Editing on one causes the other machine to update within seconds. An orange flag in the bottom right corner of the screen identifies any collaborators working on the document concurrent with the main author. Saving seems to occur between keyboard pauses and although not instant is seamless enough to not be a nuisance.

If collaborative writing is something of interest to you, do check out this most interesting product. Or use it instead of your regular word processor to see just how rapidly Internet-driven technologies have come in just the past year. Save your document online if you wish or save it to your local desktop. Print it directly to a blog if you want or turn it into a PDF that anyone can read.

Writely (www.writely.com) will make a fine addition to the Google galaxy. Whether it can scale up many times the present number of users remains to be seen.

If collaborative work in an online environment is of some interest to you, the list maintained by Chris Smith at http://tinyurl.com/8h8hh (URL reduced for this column) offers a wide variety of applications.