Ann Marcus and I had pre-Christmas briefing by Writely www.writely.com who is owned by Upstartle (a four-person company in Silicon Valley). Writely is both a synchronous and asynchronous group or collaborative writing application that is currently free and in beta. Both Ann and I thought it was pretty slick, but still needs some work!

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Although it has many of the common word processing functions your used to, and allows you to work with others on a document in a browser, it is still lacking a few things. According to Ann, it lacks a format painter feature (the paintbrush button in Word), which she finds very useful and uses all the time. Ann also thought that Writley would be a good feature to have in other web applications like Salesforce.com or Webex.

Writely was built as a challenge from a VC friend of one of the founders, and it was built in only 9 months. It went beta in late August and has recieved more press recognition and more downloads then any of the founders ever expected. This AJAX-based Web 2.0 application is easy to use, and does support collaborative or group writing, however, it does not currently have a way to detect the presence of someone you might want to work with on line. Right now you have to call them up and then invite them into the document to have them collaborate with you in real time, or send them an e-mail and have them work on the document asynchronously.

The folks at Upstartle support agile development and SAS (Software as a Service) and currently have no plans to make Writley into a product that can be used behind a firewall. However, they do listen to their beta users and have a new release about every two weeks.

Currently they are working on a series of APIs which we think will be the key to Writely's future success. Just like Crystal Reports, was the report writer that got integrated into a wide variety of applications, so should Writley also get integrated the same way. Webex, Skype, and SalesForce.com are three applications that would benefit immediatley from integration with Writely. Another request from their users is to have spell checkers in other native languages then English, which is at the top of the development list right now.

One of the biggest boosts in use Writely got was from bloggers (no this blog is written in B2 Evolution) who found that Writley provided a much more natural (and collaborative) editor for blogging then some of the arcane blogging tools available today. Just press the "blog" button and what you wrote will go into Blogger or Movable Type or other popular blogging tools. Right now Writely allows you to convert your web document to a variety of formats: RTF, DOC, HTML, ODT and PDF. Writely also allows you to upload an image into a document (up to two megabytes).

Uspstartle is currently trying to figure out their business model for when Writely is out of beta (sometime in 2006). We hope by then that they will have fixed some known bugs, added RSS feeds (so that you can get notified by RSS when someone changes a document your working on) and an API, and that they have Skype integration by then to deal with VoIP, IM and presence detection.

All in all we were pretty impressed with Writely and believe that some larger company will scarf them up in 2006 for their technology and integrate it directly into their application. Who do you think is a good candiate to acquire Writely?

Keywords: group writing, collaborative writing, asynchronous collaboration, synchronous collaboration, real time collaboration

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