First off, I wanted to announce that the excellent guys over at NetVibes have added support for Writely. So now you can have your list of active Writely documents, or the revisions from a specific document, or set of tags, appear on your NetVibes home page.

Second, we've heard from some folks who'd like us to do something similar to Flock for grabbing parts of a web page and adding it to a document for blogging. We might do this ourselves, but I thought it would be a nice opportunity to see if anyone wanted to do it for us. I think it's a pretty simple, fun, little bookmarklet to write.

More generally, as we've talked to more folks, we're starting to get offers to integrate and extend Writely. We're very interested in this. I wanted to say here that, if you have something you'd like to do to extend us, drop me a line and I'll be happy to help get you started. We had to make some minor changes to our app to get NetVibes going, we don't mind doing this sort of thing.

Finally, we'll be announcing more of these mashups in the near future - at least one next week...
 

I was talking with the NetVibes folks last week. They wanted to add a Writely module to their list. The only problem with this is that you need to send the user and password over to Writely to get the feed URL for that user back...so I wrote a little service you can call to do this. You can call it with http or https. The service is at:

http://www.writely.com/API/RSSDiscovery.aspx

You pass two parameters useremail (the user email address) and the password. So, it might look like:

http://www.writely.com/API/RSSDiscovery.aspx?useremail=someguy@writely.com&password=apassword

The service either returns an error, or the URL of that user's personal RSS feed. I thought I would post this here in case anyone else wants to add us to their start page.
 

I've been thinking a lot recently about the subject of mashups. It's trendy, and we're seeing a lot of it, so that's not surprising, I guess.

We see a lot of openness in applications that handle personal information, things like blogs, or local events, or maps, etc. Our space touches that, but it's a little different - we want to help people create and publish documents that involve daily business and personal tasks. I want to bring meaningful openness (that is, more than just an RSS feed of your calendar, for example) to this kind of data. I think this is possible, and desireable.

When we set out to do this, one of the reasons we didn't try to do a whole office suite was that we didn't think we could push users into it. I still don't. OpenOffice has been around for a long time, and has a really tiny share, and there's a reason for that - you have to add a lot of value to overcome the MS marketing machine, and user inertia. So, we thought we'd focus on a smaller problem where we could really add value, and where folks could start using it without having to make a huge committment. And, to a large degree, I think that's worked well - we've doubled every week since we've been open, with no advertising or marketing at all (finally hired a marketing person this week, though!)

The apps I see coming out that I like follow this philosophy of focusing on the user and a narrow, well-defined problem they can solve well, rather than trying to build out a whole desktop-based suite. I've started talking with a number of these folks about building a common, open, simple API for mashing these apps together. I think the idea would be that once your users get to the boundary of the problem you're solving, you need to have a good solution for helping them work with the next application (so, for us, if a user wants to do a graphical presentation, or a technical paper with Tex, etc, we shouldn't have to code it, and they shouldn't have to move the document, copy data, or sign in again to do it). If you do, they'll stay with you, if you don't, ultimately, you will not succeed.

It's my belief that this is a very powerful architecture - if it catches on, it will be very hard to exist as an application without participating in this API, and if you do participate as one, you'll have to be a very good neighbor, and work hard to solve your problem well. I think it will be a huge win for the user, and a great opportunity for developers to break out and build an ad hoc platform that solves real problems. I think the ease of connectivity on the net makes this possible, and the mashups we're starting to see are proof of concept.

I've never done anything like this before, in terms of talking to different folks about building a standard API. If you're an app developer and you want to participate, please drop me a line. I think there's something really interesting to be done here, and I'd like to get it right. I want to talk to as many folks as possible about this.

UPDATE: here's the working doc on this, email me if you want to collaborate.

http://www.writely.com/Doc.aspx?id=a469zkvzp9r
 

Up at the Web 2.0 conference. What an interesting crowd. The bubble is back, for sure.

I'm going to be giving a (very short) talk later on tonight, about Writely. Nothing too exciting, just a little bit about how we designed our UI, and why we think it works well. The short version is: listen to your users, and try to incorporate elements of both the web and the desktop. The web to add value, but the desktop to keep folks comfortable with their data and the program.

Here's the link to the presentation (In writely, of course!)

http://www.writely.com/View.aspx?docID=ar9x5dg5qmz