Writely - The (free) Web Word Processor | TUAW

C.K. told me about Writely a while back, and even when DownloadSquad blogged it in September it was available as an invite-only beta. Worse yet, it didn't (and still doesn't) like Safari. None of that matters now, however, as I just noticed that Writely seems to have opened its doors for all to come and play with a public beta. With how surprisingly cool this service is, I'll overlook the Safari incompatibility for now.

What is this "Writely," you ask? Well, at face value it is an online, collaborative word processor with a wealth of extra bonus features such as full formatting support, blog publishing, tagging, multiple format exporting and revision checking. I am seriously impressed with all the features that are available and have already bookmarked it for my paper-writing ventures in Spring. Too bad 37signals' Writeboard doesn't have any of these fantastic features (hint hint guys), otherwise I'd be able to keep everything under one Backpack roof.

One funny quirk about Writely: they're very open about how beta their service really is; once you sign in, a "Beta Meter" badge is placed on the right side of the toolbar. Nice.

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Source: http://www.writely.com/

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C.K. told me about Writely a while back, and even when DownloadSquad blogged it in September it was available as an invite-only beta. Worse...

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David Chartier

John Deal: looks like both. They have built-in support for Blogger, LiveJournal, SquareSpace and a few others, as well as support for posting to your own blog systems with API's for Blogger, MoveableType and MetaWeblog.

December 24 2005 at 2:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

john due

Does it support for blogger or wordpresss.?

December 24 2005 at 12:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Blue Meanie

Herv鵬

An open publishing medium like Wiki would be no good for collaborative writing efforts for projects such as book writing.

December 23 2005 at 9:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Herv頓.

All this for a closed-source wiki?

Go open!

December 23 2005 at 4:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Blue Meanie

Writely rocks it crazy hard. I have a had a great time using it.

December 23 2005 at 3:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Scott-O-Rama

Thanks for writing about Writely. I have been using it for a couple weeks now and I love it! Kudo's to the writely team.

December 23 2005 at 2:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brady J. Frey

Web Software is the future of all platforms, I like to see this stuff in platform specific blogs.

December 23 2005 at 2:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

B. Minich, PI

Maybe as a Mac site, he's trying to raise awareness as to how to avoid using MS Word?

It was mentioned on This Week in Tech, and I agree, it is cool enough to make me use a different browser for it. There's some stuff missing, but its a beta, isn't it? ;) I will be forwarding my concerns to the writely team, so they know what's what. Mainly, I just want it to grab the categories from my blog, so I can choose the category I want. Other than that, I like it a lot so far.

December 23 2005 at 1:56 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

bryan

so apart from the fact it doesnt work in safari, how is this mac related news?

December 23 2005 at 1:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brady J. Frey

Most of the safari problem, and we have this problem building CMS's for our clients who use safari because of this, is it's javascript bugs, largely pertaining to graphical interfaces, such as CMS or web applications. So it is a weakness in safari -- otherwise, you'd have to build two very different systems, and we used to do that for IE, we won't do that for anyone ever again:).

The webkit team is aware, I'm sure we'll see improvements within the year.

December 23 2005 at 12:14 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply