I found Writely today through the Furl most popular list.
Writely is a very cool idea. I remember reading on Jason Calacanis’ blog that he wished Google would release their GMail editor as a stand-alone web-based word processing app, and this looks like the embodiment of Jason’s wish.
Their steps of Editing, Publishing and Collaborating annoy me a bit. I think it’d be much nicer if they would simply give you a digital folder structure you could write and save documents under. Don’t try to become my collaboration and publishing service… stick with what you know and what you’re good at. Develop a kick ass free web-based word processor and leave it at that!
Not that most people will care either, but the HTML code their utility generates isn’t the cleanest either. If my entire document is in Arial and I select a section to change to another font, then change that same section back to Arial, I shouldn’t have multiple Arial tags in my code… Your app should realize “hey, there’s already a tag wrapping ALL this text in Arial… I don’t need to add a new one!”. But that really only matters to us nerds out there.
All-in-all, this is a cool site with a lot of potential! Check it out…
Cool, yah, I’m wanting this integrated with my own note taking utility, currently the ScrapBook extension in Firefox. Sam from Writely tells me they have an API in the works.
That’s cool. With any luck, the tech community will pick up this API and run to very cool places with it. I can picture several useful scenarios, not the least of which is the stand-alone web-based word processor. But, I’ll keep to myself for the time being and see what everyone comes up with on their own.