writely is back + better than before

Writely has been off the “collaborative document creation” scene since March when purchased by Google. Back then it was rated very highly, and having looked at the feature-rich version announced this week, things have improved further over the last 4 months.

It is decsribed as an “online word processor”, but it’s much more than that - it has fullscreen WYSIWYG editor with wide ranging options, can import Word documents, and save to PDF, OpenOffice, Rich Text Format and zip. There’s also support for privacy options, tags, online publishing and collaboration tools for team blogs, RSS feed, plus a range of word processing features including word count, justification, and total font control.

The system autosaves your documents every 10 seconds and they offer online storage. You can publish directly to several blogging formats including Blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal, and Wordpress, and there’s a useful help centre. This is a leap forward in collaborative document creation, and I’ll be using it over the next month rather than writeboard, my current preference.

TAGS: writely web2.0 socialsoftware