Google nearly sneaked this one in us. Late Thursday, Google quietly made Writely, the online word processor the company acquired in March, available to the online populace again. As 4PM EDT Friday, there’s still no mention of at the Press Center.
The news must have gotten lost in all of the excitement in Mountain View over attending the Star Trek convention in Vegas, which they were sure to issue a press release about yesterday – and blog about it.
Captain’s log: got so excited about Marissa Mayer in Spock ears, forgot to tell everybody about Writely.
Writely is one of those new Google-owned services that gets everybody tossing around phrases like “Microsoft-killer” and makes them rue the plight of the little guys, who’d been working on similar server-based applications.
Still in beta, the “Web word processor” requires visitors to sign up for an account before trying it out. The application allows users to share documents online, team edit from anywhere there’s an Internet connection, and store documents online.
Whether Microsoft likes it or not, users can upload Word documents, and OpenOffice documents in .doc, .odt, .rtf, or pdf, .sxw, and HTML, complete with tables, images, and fonts. And, as Anders Bylund puts it, it’s all “AJAXified,” showing third-party edits in nearly real-time and listing who’s messing with your magnum opus at the bottom of the screen.
For bloggers, Writely includes support for blogging formats like Blogger, MovableType, and MetaWeblog, and allows publishers to publish via RSS feeds through Bloglines.
All that, but, Bylund complains:
“The editor can do spell checks but no grammar checking, and you can only check spelling in English as far as I can tell. There’s no word count feature-something I need to use very often. And most significantly, at least to me, you can’t set up document templates. That’s a deal-breaker for me.”
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