Writely is Awesome

I signed up for Writely, and so far I’m very impressed. I think Google Office is complete now - all they need to do is to merge it with the rest of Google applications, and we will have a complete office suite:

* Email - check
* Calendar - check
* Spreadsheet - check
* Word Processing - check
* Instant Messaging - check

So now around 80% of your everyday tasks can be done online. I think Writely will be most useful for college students who often are forced to write their papers in campus computer labs when their roommates are obnoxious or refuse to share their computer. I have heard many tales of woe about floppies going bad, lost flash sticks, or computer crashes that resulted in loosing last 4 pages of that super important paper.

I could also see people using it to take notes in class. It takes out the hassle of transferring the file from your laptop to your desktop and etc..

As with everything Google related, I think the rule of thumb is - do not use it for stuff you would rather want to be kept private. Actually, that’s a rule that implies to the web as a whole. If you want to keep something private, do not put it on a publicly accessible server. Even if your host guarantees you privacy, they can always be forced to hand over your stuff by the courts.

What is next for Google? Are they going to implement the missing office apps? We still do not have a decent web based presentation suite. This is something they could definitely look into. Perhaps extending S5 would be a good start here?



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