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Nobody is Perfect
Now allow me to nitpick. You have easy access to older versions with Older and Newer buttons, but they aren't as easy to find as Writeboard's running list of versions on the page. I didn't see a Comment feature like the handy one Writeboard had. The buttons on Writely's interface had a funky look in Firefox, but appeared fine once you moused over them. Such is life in beta.

Writely did have a tendency to drive me nuts because it kept opening new browser windows when I clicked on certain features, but all in all, everything with Writely was going smoothly — until I tried to preview my document in Firefox. It disappeared.

I switched over to Internet Explorer. My document was gone. Or was it? This is a collaborative word processor. I can revert to a previous version; one with, oh say, the words in it. It took me only a few seconds to find my last version with words and revert to that copy.

I don't know if that was my fault or not (you tend to hit a lot of buttons when testing something like this), but to be safe I saved document and stopped playing with it.

Writely has most of the features of an offline word processor and a slick AJAX interface.

Zoho Writer

Before I get into Zoho Writer, I want to make an announcement. Earlier in the month, CNET's TechCrunch blog did a brief profile of Zoho Writer. In the comments to that post, a little squabble broke out between the Writely and Zoho Writer crowds. I'm just going to write about my experience with the tools, but I feel duty-bound to point out the location of the Intranet Journal Discussion Forum should anyone feel the need. But I digress.

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Zoho Writer advertises itself as an alpha release. They have some work to do, and they know that. The first thing you'll notice, however, is the AJAX interface that reminds you of Microsoft Word or (because this is an online word processor) Writely.

Zoho Writer doesn't send you an e-mail with your account details and a link, unlike Writeboard or Writely. In order to retrieve my notes I had to visit the site. I had asked the site to remember me, so once I got there my account and list of documents came up with one click. The document list, by the way, looks a lot like Writely.

Here's an interesting piece of functionality: while Writely let you import documents to get started with, Zoho Writer gives you an e-mail address you can send documents to. You can also e-mail images. There's a regular import function as well.

Zoho Writer has a pretty familiar Word interface, although the Save button wasn't where I expected it to be. That took a little getting used to.

When I went to View Document and came back in Internet Explorer, it seemed that extra spaces were always added between the lines. That got annoying in a "What you saw wasn't exactly what you got" sort of way. You can switch between HTML and text mode with a toggle button, much like Writely. Lists, tables, and images can all be inserted. Spellcheck, which is a newly added feature, takes a second or two and puts a pretty faint underline beneath the misspelled words. You have to look carefully.

I didn't see RSS feeds for individual documents like Writeboard and Writely had, but you can use Zoho Writer to post to blogs. It doesn't support as many blog applications as Writely, however.

Zoho Writer has a button to export your documents as either Word or PDF files. I tried to export as each file type in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, but it didn't seem to do anything. If it did export the files, I have no idea where it exported them to. Such is life in alpha I suppose.

Zoho Writer has some work to do, but there are a couple of features in here that show some promise.

Final Thoughts

Hosted office productivity applications have gotten a lot of attention lately because of the rumors (apparently untrue) that Google was working on one. There is probably a market for such an application; the question is whether there's a business plan. All three of the applications reviewed here are free (for now). Microsoft seemed content to let its users buy into SharePoint and its Windows Server line for those who want to control Office collaboration. Yesterday's announcement of an Office Live product may be a move in this direction, but Microsoft can only do so much for free without damaging its packaged software business.

There is certainly enough functionality to Writeboard, Writely, and Zoho Writer that you can use them in their present form to create and collaborate on documents. Long-term success, however, will come to: 1) the company that figures how to make money off this concept, and 2) the company that combines the best features of all three applications.

I liked the way Writeboard tracked the versions right there for me to see and allowed easy commenting. I liked the way Writely used a familiar interface and had loads of functionality. I liked how Zoho Writer lets you e-mail documents and images to an address to import them.

If I were a betting man, I'd say Writely is the favorite in this race, but that's going to depend on the business plan and how it continues to develop when its competitors play catch-up.

Let me put it this way. If I were one of the bright young people at Google, and my company was (as Google likes to say) looking to organize and make the world's information accessible, specifically by using a hosted word processing and collaboration product, I'd look into buying one of these applications. And my first call would go to Writely.

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