Google opened its gigantic checkbook again, this time for Upstartle, LLC, creators of Writely.com, a web-based word processing application. We've mentioned Writely a few times before on this site but haven't explained what makes Writely such valuable tool. So here it goes:
Writely does what Microsoft Word does however it runs in a web browser rather than an application residing on your desktop. A user creates a free account on Writely.com, starts a new document and then starts writing. Most common editing tools are available, such as bold, italics, underline, colors, background colors, strikeout, superscript, subscript (enough fun with Writely already), justifications, bullets, and spell check.
You may be saying to yourself, "What's the big deal? I can do all of that on my computer today." Very true. But here's where it gets more interesting:
1. You can access your Writely documents from any computer. Forget about dragging a computer with you. As long as there will be a computer where you're going to be, just login to Writely to access your work from there. This also means you don't have to worry about running over your laptop and losing all of your valuable work. It's stored securely on Writely's (now Google's) servers.
2. You can collaborate with others on documents in real-time. More than one person can access the exact same document at the exact same time. This can be particularly useful for group editing of documents.
3. Writely generates relatively clean HTML. Have you ever tried to publish a Word document as HTML? It usually turns into a mess and generates a TON of additional code. Writely's code is fairly clean, making it a good choice for bloggers to draft their posts. It sure beats writing in the tiny form boxes in the administrative side of most blogs.
4. Writely Stores Version Histories. Wouldn't it be nice if you could roll back your document to an earlier version before your mind started to fail you? Writely automatically saves versions of your document on the fly, making it easy to browse through snapshots of earlier versions or revert to earlier versions with a few clicks. This also makes it easy to roll back changes made by other collaborators who thought they were being helpful, but weren't really. Color coded revisions by author and time make it easy to figure out who did what when.
5. Blog Integration. Writely integrates with many popular blogging platforms, including TypePad and Blogger. Bloggers can write and publish directly from Writely, skipping the need to log in to their blog directly.
6. Save from the Web. So, what happens when you want to print or e-mail a Writely document to someone? Writely documents are currently exportable to HTML, RTF, Word, OpenOffice and PDF. They can also be printed directly from Writely without the extra date and URL headers and footers normally associated with printed webpages.
Overall, Writely is a very useful tool.
So, why did Google buy them?
Frank Gruber and
Om Malik are both predicting that Google is creating a web-based alternative to Microsoft Office. So far, they have e-mail and now word processing covered. What's next?
1. Posted by: hi2005 on March 16, 2006 9:10 PM:
Yes, I like what writely provide us. However, just after the acquisition, writely stoped the signup to new comers. According to the news, Google will roll out their web based office-like application partnering with Sun, mightbe based on OpenOffice. Shortly after that, Google acquired writely. :)