TechCrunch gives the overview of a cool looking service, Writely.
Imagine Word, but as an ajax browser application that was free. And allowed tagging of documents. And you could set reader permissions for each document you create and allow others to edit the document, or just read it. That’s what Writely is.
I signed up for the service and started to edit a little document I've been meaning to write. The interface was just what I'd expect from a word processing desktop application. I haven't tried to share the document with anyone yet so I'm not sure how that will work but from the demo and other blog posts, it looks to be very clever in how it alerts you that someone else is editing the document at the same time.
One thing which would be cool is to integrate some of the usual keyboard shortcuts for things like bold, italics and the like. Perhaps they are there but I didn't try them. I'm definitely going to use this for some of my personal writing.
In their FAQ, they mention that they are working on a enterprise version which can be run on your own server. Now that would be quite cool. I would love to use this for my writing here at work because it would be so much easier than firing up Word for every little thing. The problem is that no matter how good the security is, I am storing proprietary company information on someone else's server which I have no control over. This is the same reason I don't use Basecamp for project management.
I know you can save documents locally but that really defeats the purpose of the service. I want to be able to edit these documents from a browser no matter what computer I'm on, plus I want to share them with my colleagues.
The issue of access to data is one that any Web 2.0 company is going to have to address. While I might want to share my data with some, I don't want to share all of it.
Posted by Josh at September 1, 2005 09:51 AM