Good timing

I read Tim O'Reilly's Sep-05 What Is Web 2.0? yesterday and found the mention of Writely (linked on p5). Nice idea, I thought. Tried it, liked it, signed up.

Next day: Google bought them, signups frozen.

Next time I'm one step ahead of Google, I should file a patent or buy some shares or something.

Update (3 days later): signups are back on. After using Writely for a bit I can see that it's great and I'll stick with it. It would be excellent as the default GUI for GMail (which itself could be much better with a 'Save to GDrive' button next to 'Send' and a view of such pseudo-Saved items that looked like they were files not draft emails…) but somehow I doubt Microsoft is too worried. There's a reason why Adobe invented the pdf format and why one of the better hooks in MSOffice is the ability to use Word as your email editor - it has to do with the fact that, no matter how much CSS and XmlHttpRequest you use, a document inside a browser still looks like a webpage. There's going to have to be a dirigibleful lot more "really well-executed AJAX" and a browser that behaves perfectly with CSS3 before many who care a dot about layout will switch to an online word-processing solution. Most people don't use Word for word-processing - they use it for writing-and-amateur-desktop-publishing (the two definitions are probably merged now). Doing that through a browser is at one extra remove that adds nothing (except some quite cool collaboration options) and takes away much. While there's a case for stripping some of the sprawl of functions in Word and OOoWriter and the like but nobody's "custom streamlined Word" would look like Writely, because nobody wakes up thinking, I no longer want to Convert Text To Table and I despise the ability have the middle section of the document on landscape with three columns.

Sorry but that's how it is. I'll use Writely a lot, but not for the things I use Word and OOoWriter for.