Writely - The Web Word Processor

Writely is a Web 2.0 application that provides a fully web based word processing tool.

It provides a WYSIWYG interface with all the usual features you'd expect from a word processor, including a lot of stuff I haven't seen in similar web based tools before, eg undo/redo options, table support, etc.

It seems to use AJAX technologies to automatically save any changes you make, and provides an easy way of seeing and comparing all revisions of a document.

As it is a web application, it is able to support collaborative editing of documents. To do this, the document creator can invite other people (via email) to edit document, and they can all work on the document together. I have not tried this feature yet, but it implies that each person sees the other users edits when it refreshes every few seconds (or they click the refresh button). A handy indicator at the bottom of the screen lets you know if anyone else is also editing the document. It sounds pretty neat!

As it's web based, one important aspect is what you can do with the document once it's finish, and Writely seems to provide a whole host of options in this area. You can publish your document to a (Writely hosted) web page for everyone to view, export the HTML code to reproduce the document, export as a Microsoft Word file, or even publish directly to a blog. In fact I have used Writely to publish this post, and I don't plan on going back to the standard Blogger interface anytime soon! :)

There are loads of other features I've not looked at yet, such as Archiveing and tagging of documents, and RSS feeds, but so far I'm very impressed.

It's not going to replace Word in the business environment anytime soon, but for simple documents it provides all the features you need. And being web based gives it a number of advantages: real time collaboration, access form any location, etc. that I'm sure will create a huge user base!