Google's Writely service back in beta testing
Published:22-August-2006
By BR staff writer
Google Inc's Writely online word processing service is now up and running, providing a new challenge to Microsoft Corp's Office applications dominance.
When Google acquired Writely developer Upstartle LLC in March the company was already six months into a public beta test of its online word processing and documents storage service. The site was immediately closed to non-subscribers, however.
It is now accepting new subscribers, and offers some surprisingly advanced functionality. Documents can be uploaded from HTML, plain text, rich text, Microsoft, OpenOffice, and OpenDocument formats, while the gif, png, jpg, and bmp image formats are also supported. Alternatively users can also email documents in these formats directly to their Writely account.
Documents can also be downloaded in HTML, PDF, RTF formats, Word document and OpenDocument, as well as shared with other users, published to the world or named users, and published directly to blogs hosted by Blogger, BlogHarbor, BlogWare, LiveJournal, SquareSpace, and WordPress.
The application also enables users to add tags to their documents and track changes, as well as supporting more basic functionality such as print, spell check, copy and paste, while document content is automatically saved every 30 seconds or so.
Since Google acquired Upstartle and Writely it also purchased a small company called 2Web Technologies Inc in June to add an online spreadsheet application to its growing roster of web-based applications, which already boasts the Blogger blog management software and Picasa photo editing software.
