Buh bye, Writely

Google recently acquired Writely (if I were a true journalist, I would specify the date and the amount of the purchase) and under the cover of darkness two nights ago, released a new service Documents and Spreadsheets. This new service combines Google Spreadsheets and Writely documents all into one portal.

I really like Google's venture into the web based applications with Spreadsheets and Writely. I think that they provide some great opportunities for collaboration - I've used them to publish soccer team rosters and some required documents for games. It makes it easy for the other coaches to have the same set of documents that I do, with out having to email them back and forth. Think of disk space savings, when we all look at the same document online.

Some changes

1. Consolidated user interface - all in the Google blue and white scheme
2. One web portal for all documents
3. The ability to tag documents has been added to Spreadsheets. I really like tagging and find it to be superior to folders. I bet I could write a whole blog posting on that. Maybe...

This is cutting edge, the web based Office 2.0 applications and I think that this evolution of the Internet will be pretty neat. There have been several articles on ZDNet about the ubiquity of Internet access, offline access to web based apps, and more. This is the future.