Simon Wakeman - marketing, public relations and digital communications

Using Writely

Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 6:42 am

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This is my first post that I have written using Writely - an online writing and collaboration tool from Google. The beta launch of the site follows hot on the heels of Google’s online spreadsheets tool.

At the moment you have to sign-up for an invitation. I did this a couple of weeks ago and received my invitation this morning.

The easiest way to describe the site is as an online word processor that features a whole bunch of collaboration tools as well. Those of you who use 37Signal’s Writeboard will recognise the basic functionality in Writely, and will find a whole lot more as well.

I haven’t had a chance to play extensively yet, but some of the things that look useful are:

one-click posting to a host of different blogging engines (will be testing this with Wordpress in just a moment)
being able to invite collaborators by email
version histories (as in Writeboard)
being able to email directly into Writeboard (so you can cc an email as a starting point for an online document to work on together)
being able to tag and star documents to help keep larger numbers of documents organised
selecting documents as public and allowing anyone on the web to view them (and edit for people with invitations)
being able to save your work out as HTML, MS Word, OpenOffice formats (and more)

I can think of a wide range of applications for a system like this. I know there are many other online collaboration tools out there, but none I know of have the range of features that Writely does. However what might set Writely apart as a mainstream tool is that it’s very similar in feel to a desktop word processor that most people are familiar with - the extras are there, but don’t distract from the basic task of writing, formatting and editing.

About to hit the post button now, so let’s see how the integration with Wordpress works…

[update: 17th August 6.50am]

Posting to Wordpress went well. Easy integration within Writely. Only bug seemed to be that it didn’t carry the article title over. I also had to enter categories and tags once in Wordpress.

I don’t think Writely is intended as a blog editor (there are many tools that do this much better), but it’s useful to have that function there anyway. The real value is in the collaboration.

Tags: social+media, Software
Categories: Social media, Software

Comments on “Using Writely”

David Phillips
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
I have started to play too. I like.
Simon Wakeman - Marketing, public relations and internet professional - Writely is no more
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
[...] The Writely service has now been merged with Google’s spreadsheet system to become the imaginatively named “Google Docs & Spreadsheet“. Hop on over to Read/Write Web to see more about this, and some basic screenshots. Zoli also has a good commentary on this, and other services in the same space. I was using Writely last night, and checking back this morning it’s all gone Google on the interface, but all the functionality is still there. Personally I don’t think it looks as cool as before, but then I don’t judge its usefulness on how cool it is really. [...]