Well, I see Writely just left the private beta. I wandered by a couple minutes ago, looking for their link to Google to see what was going on and realized that I could actually sign up. Well there you go, question answered. (oh, while writing this I see TechCrunch just posted about it too.)
I’ve played with it a bit and am kinda “meh” about the whole thing. It is certainly very capable and performs nicely. Imports and exports easily too so that’s a plus. I guess for some odd reason I was really expecting this to be the online Word Processor that was just gonna blow me away. I’m impressed. But not blown away…
Works great with Firefox, even works well with ie7beta3. Appears to hate Opera 9.01. However, I added “&browserok=true” to the URL and now it seems to be working great in Opera as well; in spite of some rather dire warnings related to galactic law.
I couldn’t get the blogging integration stuff to work. Not sure why, every other external blog client I’ve tried works fine. Was curious to see how it handled images in posts, but that can wait for another day. I attempted to generate a PDF at one point and it got all wobbly on me. But hey, it’s beta so I reckon that’s allowed from time to time.
What’s the number one thing this has going for it? Google owns it. All the concerns of the data going away tend to evaporate at that point (man, has that been a common thread here this week?!?). Rich G pretty much nailed that in his comment last night. But ya know? I still think you could make the point that integrating with another provider for storage is a good thing. If nothing else, just from the “all your eggs in one basket” angle. Granted, if that basket has Google all over it…
Hmm, I see netvibes has a Writely module. Time to figure that out and see if that sways me at all.
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August 17th, 2006 
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I couldn’t get Writely’s blog editing feature to work either (for Blogger, yet!) It doesn’t come close to making the grade for WYSIWYG blog editing. See http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/writely-beta-finally-opens-with-thud.html.
-in spite of some rather dire warnings related to galactic law-
LOL… Damn the torpedoes!
[...] Last August, I had a bee in my bonnet and mentioned, several times, how nifty it would be if the online office guys were working with the online storage guys. [1] [2] [3] You know, why put all our eggs (aka documents) in one basket? Why not get some cooperation going. [...]