Andrews Family

I’ve posted on a few tools from Google, like Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, and SketchUp. Well, www.writely.com is another tool which Google has acquired. It is an online word processing tool and much more. You can log in and create text documents or upload existing documents that you’ve made on your computer in Word, or another similar program. It’s a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) and has all of the common features of a word processor like spell checking, fonts, hyperlinks, inserting pictures, printing, creating PDFs, and more. It also has more advanced features like adding comments and keeping a revision history so you can go back to previous versions. Having this as a web application opens up some interesting use cases.

Blogging - A lot of blogging software already has a built in WYSIWYG editor, although if you are running your own blog it might take some work to get it all set up. Writely.com lets you write blog posts in their nice friendly editor and then post it directly to your blog. I’m doing that with this post right now to test it out.

Online Collaboration - You can share your documents with others and even work on them at the same time. This sounds like an ideal system for a group of students who have to work on a group paper. Everyone in the group can work on the same document at the same time. They can leave comments for others. And if someone makes changes which the group later decides they don’t like, they can go back into the revision history and compare it to the previously saved versions. No one has to worry about who has the "master" file, integrating changes, tracking revisions, or worrying about losing it. Since it is web based, it also doesn’t matter if members of the group are using Windows, Mac, or Linux. I’d be interested to hear how it starts getting used by students. It also provides RSS feeds for groups of documents and individual documents. So members could "watch" their documents via RSS to know when someone else in the group updates it.

Will it replace desktop word processing software. No, but I think it does open up some cool uses. And it is open to using it with desktop software so it doesn’t have to be a choice between the two.