The Writely Blog

Scheduled maintenance for October 10th

2006-10-10T08:50:00.000-07:00

Writely will be undergoing scheduled maintenance this Tuesday, October 10th starting at 9pm PST.

We would prefer that you don't try to edit your documents around this time, as the site may go up and down unexpectedly for short periods -- it could be unpleasant. If you need something else to do at that time, here are some ideas:

In North America, check out the first game of the World Series playoffs.
In South America, go to sleep -- writing after midnight is not advised!
In Europe, spend some extra time savoring your cup of morning coffee...
In Asia, check out the featured videos on You Tube (or Google Video, if you prefer ;).

Once the maintenance is finished, we'll post again to let you know.

Google Account Sign-in LIVE

2006-09-21T15:13:00.000-07:00

Last night we turned on Google Account sign-in for Writely. This change is fantastic for everyone because Google Accounts provide a lot more functionality and flexibility to our users than our old sign-in system did.

For example, if you use other Google services, such as Google Spreadsheets or Gmail, you'll be able to use the same login email and password for Writely. If you need to change your email address or delete your account, you can do those things in your Google Account without having to contact Writely support.

The change has gone really smoothly...probably because we tested the heck out of it over the last few weeks to make sure it worked 100%! The two issues that have come up have easy solutions, and they are:

Q: "I already have another email address with a Google Account. I don't want a second Google Account for the email address that I was using with Writely. How do I switch over from one email address to the other?"

A: We built a tool that enables you to move your documents from your old Writely account into your other Google Account. First, you log into Writely using the email address that you want to use going forward. At the bottom of the Active Documents list, there's a link that says "move documents from another Writely account." Click on that link and a wizard will walk you through the process. When that's done, you can then delete the Google Account that was created for the email address you used previously with Writely.

Q: "I don't want a Google Account. How do I delete the one that was created for my Writely email?"

A: If you delete the Google Account that was created for your Writely email, you will no longer have access to Writely or to any Writely documents. Please be sure that you want this outcome before deleting your Google Account.

If you experience any other sign-in issues, please contact Writely support.

Writely registration is now open!

2006-08-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

This week, we have finished inviting everyone who's been patiently on the waiting list, and have reopened registration to the public. If you haven't already, now is the time to sign up for the Writely beta!

Why have we reopened now? Maybe it was because we just won a very nice product review on CNET ... or maybe it was that ten-billionth person who emailed us to say, "Hey what's UP? When will Writely open again?" Well, in fact, now Writely is truly ready to open its doors to everyone, so let's just do it!

By the way, we're still going to be moving to a Google Account sign-in soon, so if you don't have one already it would be great if you could take a few minutes to sign up for a Google Account, using the email address and password that you're using to log into Writely. That way when we do move to Google Account sign-in, you'll be all set.

Waitlist invitations...GO!

2006-07-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

Last week we finally started sending Writely invitations to people on the waitlist. If all goes well, we should have everyone in before summer ends. And you might have already noticed that we lifted the invitation limit a few weeks ago. Now you can invite as many new folks as you like simply by adding them as collaborators on Writely documents.

Both of these developments may not seem like much, but in fact they're two important steps on the road to reopening Writely registration. The next big step is to move to a single and easy Google Account sign-in. We'll send email to Writely users a few days before making the change with instructions about migrating your account.

Please note that you can sign up now for a Google Account using any email address -- including your current Writely address. (You don't have to have one from Gmail.) Just go to http://www.google.com/accounts.

And there'll be more improvements coming in the fall -- we can hardly wait!

Scheduled Maintenance Completed

2006-06-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

We finished updating Writely yesterday afternoon. You shouldn't really see any differences, but if you come across anything unexpected, please report it immediately via our contact form. We'll be monitoring technical issues even more closely than usual over the next few days.

We really appreciate your patience during the time that the site was in view-only mode!

Scheduled Maintenance on July 25th

2006-06-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

Writely will be down for scheduled maintenance this Sunday, June 25.

You will have view-only access to your documents during this time, so please plan accordingly.

To help you suffer as little as possible during this very temporary break from editing your Writely documents, we offer a few suggestions:

From Sam: find out who's winning the World Cup.
From Claudia: turn off the computer and read a book to your kids (Go, Dog. Go! is always a hit).
From Jen: check out Shakespeare online.

From Steve: if you simply must work on your documents on Sunday, save them to your hard drive and edit offline until Writely is back.

Once the maintenance is finished and the site is online again, we'll post again to let you know.

Hello...anybody there?

2006-05-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

A lot of you have asked us how and when you can get Writely accounts, so we put together this quick Q&A which may answer your questions.

Q: I joined the wait list 2 weeks ago, and I still haven't gotten an invitation. When can I expect to get one?

A: Our plan is to start giving Writely accounts to folks on the wait list in early July. So if you're on it already, our goal is to give you access to Writely over the summer. If you're not on the wait list, get on it!

* * *

Q: I have a Writely account, but 12 of my friends are begging me for one. What can I do?

A: No need to wait until Writely registration opens up again. When you have a Writely account, you have the power to get your 12 friends in immediately. Just add them as collaborators on a Writely document and click "OK" to email them. You can invite up to 50 new people by adding them as collaborators to Writely documents.

* * *

Q: I have 75 students that need Writely for a class assignment in the fall - can you help?

A: As above, getting your students Writely accounts doesn't depend on registration opening up again. If you have a Writely account, invite several students and then ask them each to invite the rest. If you don't have a Writely account, get on the wait list and you'll most likely be able to get accounts for your students over the summer.

* * *

Q: So when *exactly* will you be opening registration again?

A: You have no idea how much we wish we could answer this right now! But there's still much to do, and we don't want to promise something we can't deliver. We're working as fast as we can -- really. And we really appreciate your avid interest in Writely.

Wanna Webby? (we do)

2006-04-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

We recently found out that Writely has been nominated for two Webby Awards in the Best Practices and Service categories. This is a big honor, and we'll find out in just a few short weeks whether we will win. We would be extremely psyched to win one of these awards.

It turns out that there are actually two sets of awards: one for the official Webby Winners (judges select these) and another for the Webby People's Awards Winners (you online voters choose these). I figure if every happy user votes for Writely, we could have a chance to win that People's Awards hands-down.

To be clear, all the other nominees are really impressive. I feel like I'm talking about "my fellow actors" now - Webby awards are often referred to as "The Online Oscars" - the competition is an esteemed group. May the best sites win!

P.S. The voting deadline is midnight on May 5th...

Post-April Fool's Post

2006-04-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

Having missed the opportunity to do an April Fool's blog post, we actually have something reasonably blog-worthy to share today.

In response to your requests, we've just raised the new collaborator invitation limit from 20 to 50. And we've been working very hard (no vacations for the Writely gang) to move Writely to Google's systems, too. We've made good progress, but we aren't ready to open the beta up again to uninvited registrations. Raising the limit, though, should especially help you teachers out there who are using Writely for class assignments and need to invite a slew of students as new Writely users.

Also in response to your feedback, and to help ensure that we get back to you more quickly for urgent support issues, we've put up a new feedback page. It's much better than our old one because now you can categorize what you're emailing us about. That way we can quickly spot the really important stuff (like if you're having trouble signing in or accessing your documents) and get back with you promptly to resolve issues.

Google? Yep, Google!

2006-03-09T09:53:00.000-08:00

Some of you have been worried about our future here at Writely. As one concerned user wrote:

"I love Writely, but... I was wondering, is there any way to send you guys some money? I understand it's free and all, but I just feel bad that you don't charge. Thanks!"

We appreciate the sentiment, and all the support we've gotten from our users, but thankfully, your donations won't be necessary, for one very exciting reason:

Writely is now part of Google!

Yes, we've been acquired by Google, and we're really excited about this for many, many reasons. But I can hear you saying, "I don't care why YOU'RE excited - I want to know how this change will impact ME!"

Our #1 priority is to maintain (and improve) the reliability, privacy and security of the Writely service for our current users.

The Google announcement will undoubtedly generate a lot of interest in Writely -- perhaps too much -- and we're committed, on your behalf, to keeping our current service running smoothly. So, while we're moving Writely to Google's software architecture, we're closing off new registrations. Get on the waitlist and we'll notify you via email when you'll be able to try out Writely.

But what if you're already using Writely? Don't worry,

Current users can keep using Writely as is.

Yes, you can keep using Writely, and we promise that we'll work hard to ensure that the transition to our new Google-ized service is seamless. And yes, we agree that the ability to share documents and collaborate is critical to Writely users, so we'll continue to allow existing users to add collaborators even as we temporarily stop accepting new sign-ups. However, we are limiting the number of new collaborators (who aren't already registered with Writely) that you can add for the next few days.

Questions?

We figure you probably have lots more questions, so we came up with an FAQ to answer them. But enough about you! Aren't you at all curious about why WE (Sam, Steve, Claudia and Jen) are excited about being part of Google?

Here are our "top 10" reasons why being part of Google is fantastic for Writely and the Writely team:

10. Writely is like a caterpillar that we hope to make into a beautiful butterfly at Google!
9. We love Google's philosophy and values -- especially "Focus on the user."
8. We're as passionate as Google is about respecting users' privacy.
7. Many of our users are already Google fans using other Google services.
6. Being at Google will help us do more great things faster.
5. Some people didn't feel comfortable trusting a tiny startup with their documents...and we're no longer a tiny startup.
4. We like lava lamps and they're pretty much standard decor at Google.
3. Three words: Free Googleplex lunches ;)
2. As fun as it's been to launch a popular, global, 24x7 Web service, it'll be nice to take a vacation once in a while!
...and the number one reason???
1. We'll be able to bring Writely to not just thousands but millions of users -- the more, the merrier :-)

Thanks to everyone who has helped us get here...especially all our Writely beta users!

Spam, spam, spam, spam...

2006-02-09T14:54:00.000-08:00

Looking for that unclaimed million-dollar lottery ticket? Instant university degrees? Various enlargement creams or shrinking pills? Please look elsewhere!

It is so frustrating for us to discover that some loser has been sitting in his basement cranking out unsolicited e-mails with forged writely.com server addresses on them. As if!

We take our business and our reputation very seriously. Over the last week, we've investigated thoroughly the complaints of 6 users who have received spam e-mails with writely.com in the e-mail header. All of these turned out to be fakes.

(FYI, the purpose of the e-mail header is to show all the server stops that the e-mail made on its way from the sender to the recipient. There's a helpful, much more detailed explanation about e-mail headers on stopspam.org if you want to learn more).

If you receive a dubious e-mail on our behalf, please forward it to us at abuse@writely.com, so we can continue to investigate!

February Already?

2006-02-01T20:29:00.000-08:00

Events conspired to keep the latest changes from appearing in January. Nonetheless, we just released:

An improved active documents tab.
It's now much shorter and only includes documents from the last month. No more truncated titles, tags or document names -- and, the columns are now sortable. Active documents now appear bold in the lists.
The ability to empty the Trash.
Finally! Get rid of unwanted documents, shared or private. If they're not yours, you'll just be removed from them.
List numbering and styles.
Nest lists, start numbering them at whatever you like, and display them as alphabetic, numeric, roman numerals, etc. You can also move list items up and down through the context menu (I just moved this list item up one -- cool!).
Blog posting with categories.
Whatever tags you apply to your documents will now get passed through as blog categories. A very popular request!
Selecting viewers to e-mail when publishing.
Checkboxes let you control who to include in your messages.
Various bug fixes.
Pasted links in the HTML view remain intact; context menus and spelling suggestion menus no longer fall off the edges of the window if they're too close to the side or too long; and more. We also shifted some items between the File and Edit menus, when some of you pointed out our inconsistencies.

Firefox released a patch today that fixed the pasting bugs that have been plaguing us. We worked around most of them (insert link, bookmark, etc.), but plain ol' pasting wasn't something we could fix. If your copy of Firefox didn't prompt you to update, just go to Help > Check for Updates.

Beta meter up to 53%!

2006-01-26T21:14:00.000-08:00

53% of Writely users who have voted think that we're ready to end the beta! You may very well ask (and some of you have) what ending the beta actually means, in concrete terms. To my mind, it means that Writely has reached a high level of quality such that it should be officially launched as a finished product. (In case you're not sure what the beta means in the first place, I personally like this definition of what a beta test is.)

The higher the beta meter, the closer we get to ending the beta period and officially launching Writely. Launching Writely essentially means that we remove the "(beta)" label from our logo :-) Seriously now, it means that a solid majority of users find that Writely does what they need it to do. To be quite honest, we haven't yet had a conversation about what number the beta meter has to reach before we make the decision to leave beta...but we'll know it when we see it, I'm sure.

Here's how the beta meter works: Each Writely account user has a vote. While you have only one vote, you can actually change your vote whenever you like. Re-voting doesn't add another vote to the tally; it changes your one vote, and that change will be reflected in the next tally. Every week or so, Steve runs a script that re-tallies all the beta votes.

Some very candid people have emailed us feedback (because of course if you vote "no" we ask you to tell us why not) that they don't want Writely to end beta because they want Writely to be free forever. They're concerned that the minute we end beta, we'll start charging all our account holders. I'd like to encourage those people to rethink their votes, because we intend to offer the basic Writely service for free even after the beta ends.

To be clear, we also intend to create a premium service level with additional functionality that folks can subscribe to, optionally. Any features that we think might someday be part of the premium service offering are noted in Writely with a little "Premium/$" flag...so far there's only one...let's see if you can find it!

Time to reconsider your beta vote?

2006-01-13T12:25:00.000-08:00

We've switched over to DHTML dialogs, so you can go back to complaining about Safari and/or Opera ;). There's lots more, too:

DHTML Dialogs instead of pop-ups (turn ON your pop-up blockers, please).
The new document still comes up in a separate window, though, as most folks say they like that.
In-line comments.
You can now insert color-coded comments that are hidden when you preview, publish or post.
New editor tabs.
We've reworked the editor tabs to make everything from collaboration to blog posting just one click away.
New editor toolbar.
We've consolidated and simplified it so it's easier to use.
Currently selected font face and size show.
See the current font selections in the new editor toolbar.
New table functions.
Move Row Up/Down and Change Column should help make editing tables much easier.
Right mouse click to open link in editor tab.
You can make sure your links work without previewing, first.
The return of private RSS feeds.
With lots of disclaimers like: Putting this feed up on a public site might allow others to see the titles of your private documents as well as who changed them and when.
Style for right-to-left languages.
Bring on your Hebrew and Arabic! Now you can write right-to-left.

Feel free to change your Beta meter vote to YES!!!

It's a new year...

2006-01-02T10:23:00.000-08:00

Happy 2006 to you & yours from the Writely Team!

We especially want to thank all of our 2005 users for being willing to try Writely as "early adopters" and helping make Writely better through your day-to-day usage and feedback. We love you! :-)))

2006 is going to be a big year for Writely. We have a LONG list of "new year's resolutions" - ambitious plans to build improvements and big new things, many of which originate from our user feedback and user forum, of course.

On a personal note, I hope you all enjoyed new year's eve more than I did. I rang in the new year with stomach flu...so sick I couldn't even log into my computer to respond to Writely user feedback. But now I'm back on my feet & eating like a normal person, thankfully.

The team is cranking on a Writely release that we hope to get out by this coming weekend. I am working on our first quarterly Writely newsletter, which I'll send out after the release goes live. I'm toying with the idea of creating a user competition of sorts - like "most creative use of Writely" - and giving out a prize to the winner(s). We'll see if that makes it into the newsletter...

Sam on NPR

2005-12-22T09:55:00.000-08:00

Unexpected PR event of the week: Sam's interview on NPR.

And, while Writely's still holding up, we're getting huge traffic spikes every time the piece runs. If you run into a span of slowness, please accept our apologies -- just wait a few minutes and it may get better.

Holiday? What holiday?

2005-12-20T23:14:00.000-08:00

Ah...a quiet week before the holidays. Some time spent with the family, wrapping a few last-minute presents by the fire. So quiet and cozy and...

Not!

Just when we're recovering from last week's traffic, and things are starting to settle down again -- Whammo! A quick mention in the 'This Week In Tech' podcast and a column by John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine and we're off again! It's a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.

We're Writely users ourselves, and are thus very aware of the performance issues we've been having. Believe me, holiday or not, we are working to make everything run faster.

Thank you to everyone for your patience with our beta!

Now, please go out shopping, or drink some eggnog, or something! ;o)

Writely Quick Note Bookmarklet

2005-12-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

I love remixes...this is a nice start:

http://www.reach-out.org.uk/writely/

More (hopefully) soon!

The Rise of the Mammals

2005-12-12T12:29:00.000-08:00

I stole the title - it's from Michael Mace's posting here. This is very well put, and is something we've been thinking about for a while at Writely.

I'll add one thing to the mix - in the days of OpenDoc, etc, integration was at the level of programming languages, which are typically very brittle and hard to deal with.

One of the things that's really different in the web world is that we're starting to componentize, as Michael put it, at the level of metadata - formats like SOAP, RSS, XML, REST (well, that's not a format, but you get the idea), are not just language independent but platform, country, network, etc independant. Think about the difference between working with a web service versus a COM object. Think about how hard it would have been to develop an app on top of Google maps, if you had to write COM code and get it ported to the mac and linux...who would have bothered? It's much easier to do something that just...works....across all kinds of localized, mac/win/linux systems. Like it or not, XML, JavaScript, JSON, AJAX and the rest are really, actually, finally, systems that can be used to reach a really broad number of users with minimal hassle.

I think this is what's really amazing about the current situation, and it's what reminds me of "Web 1.0", when it was suddenly apparent that the combination of HTML and TCP/IP was a really, really powerful global publishing and communication mechanism. As a salty old desktop developer, it's thrilling.

Anyway, an interesting read, I think, even if we are mentioned in it. :)

Pre-holiday presents...

2005-12-09T21:32:00.000-08:00

I know -- I'm the most boring blog poster ever. No fun stories or pretty pictures; just the facts. But, if you've been waiting for PDF or cursing us for losing changes when collaborating, then I suspect I'm about to get a bit more interesting...

Today, we added:

Save as PDF.
Look for 'Save as PDF' on the Action menu in the editor. Note: this is our first to-be-premium feature, meaning it will be part of a paid subsription service once we come out of beta.
MUCH better collaboration collision handling.
We've fixed some problems and added a pop-up that lets you retrieve your lost changes.
More bug fixes.
Find & replace, the @ sign for Int'l keyboards.
More localized FAQs.
These are now available as a drop-down from the Help Center and FAQ page. We've added Traditional Chinese, Turkish and Vietnamese. Thank you, fabulous volunteer translators!
The beta meter.
Help us decide when we're ready to come out of beta!

Happy Holidays from Writely! ;-)

Lotsa Little Stuff

2005-12-08T18:33:00.000-08:00

We're almost done with scaling the site past 100,000 users. We should be able to support a million users by the end of the month!

In the meantime, we've added some of the top-requested features and bug fixes:

Find and Replace.
Simple text find and replace (regular expressions are also supported).
E-mail to a subset of Collaborators.
Checkboxes let you select just which collaborators to send the message to.
RTF Support.
Upload and Save As in Rich Text Format.
A handful of tag bug fixes and enhancements.
Better support for multiple tags, alphabetic sorting and a fix for the single-quote bug.
IE Tab key support.
As in FireFox, you can use the Enter key to navigate tables and indent lists.
The much-requested Favicon.
(only seems to appear in FireFox -- what's the deal with IE??).
Some RSS tweaks.
Added an additional parameter to include only pulished documents.
FAQs in local languages.
Starting with Slovenian, but more languages to come!
Fixes to the jumpy saving status message.
That was driving us nuts, too!
The Remember me checkbox now defaulted to off.
We also renamed it since it was confusing people.

December Decisions

2005-12-03T00:32:00.001-08:00

This month the Writely team will be making some key decisions that will determine our future. We have already decided that we will get some outside investment in order to stay ahead of our fast user growth and kick butt on meeting our users' needs in the years to come. So the open question then becomes: "What investment do we take?" That blanket question covers everything from how much and under what terms to from whom. So in addition to cranking out functionality enhancements and supporting our users, we'll be dedicating several hikes (we have most of our team meetings either over lunch or on a hike) to discussing and debating this key question. We've ruled out bake sales, by the way :-)

Fortunately, we've had lots of interest from many different types of investors. One of our informal advisers (whose identity we will not reveal here) told us earlier this week that choosing an investor is like choosing a mate - you both decide whether you like each other in the first 15 minutes of meeting. If you like each other, you expend lots of effort to find out details about each other that you hope will confirm the first impression. If you don't like each other (or if one of you doesn't like the other), you say "nice meeting you" and never meet again. It's an interesting analogy, at any rate. We're all married with children, though, so no one is taking this advice literally.

In a perfect world, we would continue to bootstrap Writely until we earn profit through a wildly successful premium service offering (for example), and so we would never need outside investment. But that's just not realistic given the growth and the enthusiastic response from users that we're seeing. So instead we'll be drumming up investment in 2006 - to fuel our growth and make sure that we keep our users happy for the long term!

Writely Embraces the OpenDocument Movement

2005-11-21T20:47:00.000-08:00

"The Web Word Processor" Now Supports Both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Document Formats

PORTOLA VALLEY, Calif. - November 21, 2005 - Writely (www.writely.com), The Web Word Processor, today released support for OpenDocument Format (ODF), the open standard document format backed by Sun Microsystems, IBM and Adobe. Starting today, Writely users can upload documents into Writely from Microsoft Word and Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org, as well as save the documents back into either of those formats. Sun and Google announced last month their intention to explore jointly enhancing and promoting OpenOffice.org...

...this is Jen's first press release on our behalf, and man are we happy to have her! To read the rest, click here.

And now for something completely different...

2005-11-16T23:25:00.000-08:00

Desktop search integration with Writely? Yup - the good people at Ask Jeeves Desktop Search added the ability to search Writely docs in their latest beta release. Send us feedback if you have any ideas for other desktop-bound integration with Writely that you'd like to see (I'm thinking things like desktop shortcuts to Writely docs).

International Writely? Absolutely - we have users all over the globe, and we like it that way! Since we are small and so quite resource constrained at the moment, we're trying to figure out a way for our users to help us translate some key pages. Makoto just volunteered to translate our FAQ page into Japanese, so when she's done with that translation we'll link to it from the English FAQ page. If you're interested in helping us translate a Writely page, just email me and I'll make a copy of the page for you to work from.

Italian Writely? Si - Italy's Corriere della Sera recently ran an article mentioning Writely. Here's a rough translation of our mention: "To say it in more explicit terms than Microsoft would use, if you can write a document using a free service like www.writely.com and share it with distant collaborators, will you still need Microsoft Word, Hotmail or Sharepoint (a Microsoft software particularly aimed at cooperative work in a group)?"

Which reminds me that since I'm relatively fluent in Italian, shouldn't I personally step up to translate the FAQ page into Italian? OK, if noone else volunteers by this weekend, I'll suck it up and do the Italian translation! (E credetemi, sarebbe meglio per tutti quanti se io non facessi la traduzione visto che la mia madrelingua non 'e italiano e allora far'o un sacco di errori stupidissimi!)

While I'm on the subject of Italy, one of my public Writely docs is the entire text of Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova in which Dante meets and falls in love with the beautiful Beatrice. And since this blog has no images, I leave you with an image (filtched from Flickr) of one of my favorite Italian hamlets: San Gimignano.

Revised Revisions

2005-11-11T11:19:00.000-08:00

Just the other day, someone remarked that for folks who make communication tools, we sure don't post a lot to our blog.

It's true, but what can I say? We're really busy!

Speaking of which, we put up some new stuff yesterday:

A completely redone Revisions tab.
You can page through your revisions just like before, but also get a list of all revisions and compare any two. We now display each collaborator's edits in a different background color, and deletions as colored, strike-out text.
Revamped Blog tab.
A cleaner page layout should make it more obvious how to use it. The option to include the title or not is now global, and a link to edit the title has been added.
Revamped Publish tab.
As with the Blog tab, the layout has been simplified, and a Stop Publishing button added.
Many bug fixes.
Including correct timezones for blog posting, a workaround for Blogger's unbalanced tag touchiness, and working page break insertion on FireFox.
Miscellaneous enhancements.
More fonts in the drop-down menu, full paragraph justification and block quotes.

Next up (before American Thanksgiving, on the 24th), we're hoping to release our new, in-progress conversion back-end, which will include support for OpenOffice files, RTF, PDF (export-only), Word Perfect, and more. It will also include a much better Word conversion, thanks to the awesome folks at OpenOffice.org (and Froilan! and Gabor!).

After that, we've got several weeks of tough, meaty work to do, which won't result in a big bullet-list of features, but should greatly improve collaborative editing.

If I haven't mentioned a feature or improvement you've been waiting for, not to worry -- we've got a list about a mile long of things to do after these two releases. Also, we tend to do things iteratively, so that we're constantly improving the site. This means that we'll probably implement at least part of something you've been waiting for before too long. Non-Roman character sets, comments, styles/templates and improved printing are all high-priority for us. And, at some point, we will localize as well, undoubtedly starting with Spanish.

And, last, the big question: when might we start charging for things? That plan hasn't changed. We don't plan to offer premium subscriptions until we come out of beta, which will be early next year -- when our quality is high enough. (Nothing on the site as of this post is considered premium; everything you see is still just basic stuff).

Writely in the News

2005-11-03T03:04:00.000-08:00

Writely has been in the news a lot, lately...just today we got a mention in a Business Week article about Microsoft's "Live" software announcement. Judging from the announcement, it doesn't look like Microsoft is going to crush us any time soon ;-}

On another note, did you know that November is the National Novel Writing Month? This is a very cool, grassroots-organized event turned non-profit that is partnered with Room to Read, the international children's literacy program. I only know about it because there are at least a handfull of folks who are using Writely to author their novels...they can log in to write from work, home, a friend's house or even email some creatively inspired prose from their cell phone! OK, maybe that last one won't actually happen, but isn't it cool to know that you could do it if you really wanted to??? Speaking of novels, my brother has written one and just this last week got an agent to help him get published! Yay, Bean :-)))

Last but not least, we sent emails to 1,000 Writely users last week inviting them to fill out a survey to help us make Writely better. These were all folks who had logged into Writely once, but not subsequently and we want to know what we can do to make Writely more compelling or "sticky," as they say in the candy business. The good news is that most folks hadn't logged in again not because they felt that Writely sucked in some way, but because they "haven't had the time, but intend to keep using Writely." In case you're wondering, that's short-hand for "cleaning my toilet is higher on my priority list than using your mildly interesting product." However we are not daunted!! We comb all the feedback we get for great new ideas and we even just started a Writely User Forum to get more tips, tricks and suggestions from our beloved users. Yes, I'm kissing up but it's actually heart-felt.

Oh one other thing...this was my first blog posting EVER! Excuse me as I need to go drink a cool glass of water and breathe deeply now...

The Writely User Forum

2005-11-02T14:44:00.000-08:00

It has only been live a few days, and already we've got some great stories on how people are using Writely.

Some folks have been posting problems they've had, and before we even get to them, other folks have been posting solutions! There is no question about it: we do have the best users in the world!

Come ask them questions (or answer some!) on the Writely User Forum.

Tools and more tools

2005-10-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

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...

Calling all RSS Readers

2005-10-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

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.

Posting to Blogger

2005-10-11T07:30:00.000-07:00

Test post *** Test post *** Test post

(Hey look -- it's working again!)

Sorry about the last few days, but we've resolved the main issue with posting to Blogger from Writely.

There are still some problems, as Blogger is very picky about the format of what it will accept, but we hope to resolve those soon, as well.

So, please, give it another try -- really!

Mashups and Openness

2005-10-07T08:44:00.000-07:00

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

Web 2.0

2005-10-05T13:38:00.000-07:00

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

New Features

2005-10-02T19:11:00.000-07:00

We updated the site today, adding:

Blogging to most major blog sites, including WordPress, MovableType and LiveJournal, among others. (Unfortunately, posting to TypePad is not quite working yet -- check back later this week.)
E-mail documents, images notes, etc. directly into Writely.
Indicators in the document lists for published and blogged documents.
An enhanced Actions menu in the document editor.
Handy one-click shortcuts in Collaborate, Publish and Blog.
Bookmarks and a better insert link dialog.
New line-spacing formats.
Better blog post title editing.

Sorry it's been awhile between updates. We're determined not to let it go this long again!

Please let us know if you have any problems posting to your blog from Writely, as there are a lot of little bits that could potentially go wrong, and our goal is to make it be painless.

Whee! That was fun

2005-09-29T20:48:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone! We got slashdotted today...it was an interesting experience.

The site seems to have held up well, aside from a brief period when it was not possible to register new accounts. If anyone experienced a problem, please let us know!

I also wanted to thank folks for giving us all kinds of great feedback. We love it all, positive or negative. We feel very strongly as a team that the only way to develop great products is to listen hard to your customers and iterate constantly. We're working as hard as we can to make Writely as great as we can make it. All the feedback helps. Don't be shy about negative feedback - it's useful too.

Lots of folks on the web are saying we're a threat to Microsoft, or something to that effect. I don't know if that's true or not (probably not), but it's not really what we're about. We really only care about one thing - that our users have a really great, useful experience with us, and that they (you) want to come back and use us again and again, and tell your friends about us.

I'm sorry I haven't been writing, we've been really busy. I have a lot I've been thinking about, with regards to how the Web 2.0 world is likely to go. I think it's interesting, and will surprise us all. Just as the open source world got a lot of power from the surprising direction of openness, I think Web 2.0 will get surprising amounts of power from similar areas: openness, connectivity, communication, and trusting and listening to your users. It's already clear that one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 will be a much, much higher velocity in the application realm. Possibly we'll start to see applications that are customized to individual users on the fly, that connect and optimize groups in surprising ways, that foster global businesses with even more speed than before (we're hearing some really interesting business ideas coming up our of the user base, it's wild). These apps seem like simple ideas, but simplicity and reach is part of the power.

We have an iteration coming in a few days, hopefully. It's been three weeks since we did the last one, which is the longest it's ever been for us. This is light on major features (more blog providers, some UI fixes, and the ability to email documents into the system, or cc the system on emails and have them become collaborative), because we're focusing on fixing problems people have been reporting with the UI and workflow.

We've heard about Open Office, we've heard about Safari, we've heard about Opera, we've heard about localization, we've heard about the API, we've heard about templates...it's all on the list, and we'll get to it faster than you think!

Thanks again for the patience and the support. It humbles us. And, to quote Wynton Marsalis: "The humble improve".

What does the Microsoft Reorg mean?

2005-09-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

If you follow the "Web 2.0" area, of which, I guess, we are a part, the Microsoft reorg this week was an interesting event. It's been widely interpreted as a reaction to the kind of work that's been going on with applications like ours. Here's a good posting looking at this event in some detail.

The author, Keith Teare, a Venture investor looking at this space closely, discusses how the shape of the network is changing in light of new technologies. I think his take is interesting. I wouldn't have used his words exactly, but I do see the trend he points out, and it's what we saw clearly when starting Writely: everything is becoming more powerful and cheaper. Servers, programming environments, browsers, etc. The modern browser with async JavaScript (e.g. AJAX) is a fairly good platform for developing a certain kind of application, especially one targeted to a broad audience, and it's cheap to experiment with.

This means, as Keith points out, that innovation is moving out to the edges (or as we saw it, to smaller companies and startups). That's not to say that there aren't opportunities in the center - personally, I think big, well established companies like AOL, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Salesforce.com, and (maybe) Oracle are in a good position to make plays in the center that will be very rewarding. We see a number of ways Writely needs to interact with the center of the network - without it, we'd just be a copy of WordPad, for example.

But the point is that it's now possible to do something that wasn't really ever possible before - experiment with new products, paradigms and interfaces cheaply, and get that experimentation out to a very broad audience (also cheaply). It's been possible to hack out little apps on the desktop for a while, and it's been possible to have broad reach with simple web pages and web apps for a while, but it's only been a little while since you can create a really rewarding web experience with broad distribution in the installed base. And, with modern hosted servers so easy to get these days, you can serve a lot of users for not much money.

So...interesting times, indeed. I think we'll see a lot of innovation on the edges. The one danger I see is that the toolkits are so powerful that folks tend to want to toss every feature they can think of into the apps. Personally, we don't think this is the winning idea. It's not that we aren't going to add features - we are, and how! It's more that keeping the message and UI of the application simple is a very important part of being successful on the web. It's the web part of "blending desktop and web" that you need to survive. What this means for UI design depends on the app - it probably means the UI changes as the task changes.

I suspect Microsoft is going to try hard to make this even easier. If they're smart, they and the rest of the portal companies will make it even easier for small companies to innovate, in a way that is somehow integrated with their center. Or, maybe just integrate a bunch of the apps directly. Personally, I'd love to see things like being able to use slawsome to put verbal comments on a Writely page...and we don't need the center for that. Hmm...

Net Work

2005-09-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

I stole the title of this from Peter Rip, who's been doing some very good thinking about what's going on in Web 2.0 right now (hint - if you're looking for a VC who gets it, Peter is it).

I have been telling people for a while now that one of the reasons I think apps like Writely resonate, is that more and more, what you do on a daily basis happens on, in, or around the net. I'd been struggling with trying to put this concept into compact form, and Peter nailed it: Net Work.

I'll let you read the rest on his site, it's only fair. But go read - it's worth it.

http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2005/09/ajax_office_is_.html

Worse is Better

2005-09-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

Found some interesting posts today. This over on OK/Cancel there is a very good discussion of whether and why to build Ajax apps. A quote I like:

What's the difference between Oddpost and Gmail? One followed desktop interaction conventions, required a particular browser and a particular operating system, and gained a cult following. The other came along four years later, followed Web interaction conventions, worked across all modern browsers -- and transformed its entire category. Some might argue that Oddpost is the more sophisticated solution. But Gmail is part of the larger Web in a way that Oddpost never could have been.

The rest of the discussion here is about whether or not Ajax will take off. I don't think users care, they care about the solution...and nice, light, pretty, no-install apps in the browser are going to win this fight. And Ajax is really the only technology that can hit all those points (Java is a download, and usually a JVM version hassle, Flash is pretty but kind of sluggish, and lives more or less in a walled garden on the page unless you work very hard, etc).

Another interesting thing popped up, Ajaxian covered Bindows. Personally, I think this is a very nice toolkit, but exactly the wrong direction. I think it's wrong to just try to replicate the desktop experience - this is the exact mistake many early windows apps made. Remember DOS apps ported into Windows? And then being eaten by folks who get it. That's this, I think. One of the reasons the web is so nice is that the page UI is simple...a few things at a time, a very easy metaphor, etc. It passes the "mom" test - I can usually just tell my mom to go to a site, and she usually can figure it out. I can't remember the last time I could do that with a desktop app. So, even though the windows desktop is "richer", it's not neccesarily better.

There was a discussion long ago about how sometimes "worse" is actually better, if it's simpler, has broader reach, etc. I think the two above stories are examples of exactly this.

Random Thoughts

2005-09-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

Well, we've been getting more and more feedback from folks. Most of it very positive, which is great. Steve and I talked about what all of this means, what Writely is. Is it real? Is it a toy? (well, if we are, in the words of Woody from Toy Story "You're a cool toy!").

I think this is very real. Now that we've looked harder at this space, and watched what people are doing, I think that Writely really does represent the first of a new kind of application - desktop apps re-invented for the web. Specifically, we're something between email and desktop publishing. More importantly, I think this, and the other Web2.0 apps, are really here to stay.

Why?

Because they really are better. They really make things easier to do, in a persistent, fundamental way. One analogy is web mail - it was inevitable that it would take over a lot of (not all of, but a lot of) the email market because it was better - easier for some things, and with the benefit of universal access.

I think Writely is much the same, with even more benefits. I call it the "three A's": Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime. Obvious to those who live and breathe the net, but valuable none the less. I think as users get used to the idea of Word processing on the web, the questions will be less "why would I create this document there?" and more "why wouldn't I?" And I think we're going to work hard to make it easier and easier to do this - more entry points, more apis, more features in the editor, more document types (like spreadsheets), more and more and more polish.

Speaking of API, that's the other ramble for tonight. I've been thinking of the structure for the API. I think we're going to go with a very simple to deal with XML format over HTTP, with an option to get the output in JSON format as well.

The API will be pretty simple. There are only three verbs: GET, PUT, and POST. And maybe just GET and PUT. The nouns are documents, revisions, contacts and assets. Each API call will have a "basis set" of things to operate on (which might be one document or user, or all of them, or some subset), a simple filter stack to filter from that basis (like "all documents where user is sam@writely.com"), and then an optional set of fields. So a query would look something like: (sorry for the square brackets - pretend they're angle - I can't get blogger to do entity encoding)

HTTP GET

[request]
[noun]document[/noun]
[basis]some id[/BASIS]
[field name="title"]
[field name="tags"]
[/request]

That would return the title and tags from the document who's id was passed. (This request has no filter stack)

The response would look like:

[result]
[field name=""]
[result][field name=""]the document title[/field]
[field name=""]the document tags, comma separated[/field]
[/result]

or

[result]
[failure]unknown document id[/failure]
[/result]

Comments are welcome - this is all preliminary.

Peter Gets It

2005-09-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

A nice article from my friend Peter Rip, who's been meditating on Writely for a while. I think my favorite thing he said is "how many Word documents do you make that aren't in some way shared".

Writely is the Seed of a Big Idea

Worth a read.

OpenOffice and OASIS Support

2005-09-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

We've heard from a number of folks that want OpenOffice support. We'd be happy to oblige, but we can't find a translation library to move OASIS into either Doc or HTML format. If you know of one you think we've missed, please drop me (sam at our domain) an email about it.

...And Camino support

2005-09-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

I should probably save this and announce it tomorrow. :)

We just released alpha support for Camino (actually, I think it's better than Alpha, but we haven't run the full test on it yet), and fixed a nasty bug in the new Deer Park beta of FireFox that was getting in folk's way. So...if you tried us in FireFox and it didn't work, try again, please!

And if you're a Camino user, give us a shot, and tell us what doesn't work!

Beta now open + Blogger posting

2005-09-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

We have re-opened our public beta, so if you were waiting, then now's the time to sign up.

We are also testing posting to Blogger; please give it a try. I posted this directly from Writely, and I must say it was much better than posting from Blogger itself. I set up my post preview to look just like this blog does, so I could see how it would appear before posting it. Sweet!

The UI itself continues to evolve, and you may notice some other wording changes (such as "Collaborators" instead of "Authors", etc.) and bug fixes.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback -- and thanks for helping us test Writely!

What are you, anyway?

2005-09-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

"What's a wiki?"

Ask that question to the 95% of the population that doesn't code for a living, or write seriously, and they'll say it right back to you: "I don't know, what is it?"

"What's a document?" "What's word processing?" "What's a web page?"

Ask almost anyone those questions, and you'll probably get the right answer.

People ask me from time to time, "Isn't this just a wiki?". They're almost always either investor valley types, or bloggers, or programmers. My answer is, well, yes and no. It is, technically, a wiki - a collection of pages that you can easily link together. But then, Napster was technically just an FTP client and a vertical search engine, right? No big deal.

Well, no. It is a very big deal if you do something that lots of people want (online, shared, safe documents) in a way that's easy enough to deal with so that they can really do it. That's a big part of what we think we are - the easy way for folks to collaborate, publish, keep notes, make web pages, push to their blog, etc. Eventually, we hope to be even more useful than just plain pages, but that can wait. For now, we're just focusing on solving this problem really well.

The other question I get asked a lot is related - "So, how much of Word are you planning to copy?" The answer is: "none of it". We don't think of ourselves as a copy of Word on the web. We think that's what's known as a "dancing bear" - interesting and novel, but only because it's so weird, not because it's really useful.

What we are planning to do is to listen, very closely, to our users, and to iterate and improve the application as often as we can (currently every week or so), so that it's constantly getting better. Nothing makes me happier than all the great, positive feedback we've been getting, except maybe the negative feedback we sometimes get that helps us improve.

We're a word processor, re-invented for the web. We're going to be the best, most useful tool we can be in this context. We hope to keep you delighted for a long time.

I'll post on some upcoming features and ideas soon.

The things you learn...

2005-09-13T06:39:00.000-07:00

When we launched Writely, I knew that running a public web site would be an educational experience. But I didn't realize that running a site for writers would be even more so. For example, I had no idea that I would finally learn the difference between "who" and "whom". Today, we got the following feedback regarding the phase "Only who you choose" in the FAQ:

Actually, this should be "whom you choose." The simple rule of thumb is: Invert the question into a statement, do you use 'he' or 'him'? e.g. you say "I choose him," not "I choose he."

I knew the difference between "their", "they're", and "there". I even knew when to use "its" and when to use "it's". But I'd always wondered about "who" and "whom". Now I know, and now you know.

Why aren't you supporting Safari!!!

2005-09-09T12:53:00.000-07:00

We hear you, loud and clear. Lots of Mac users want Safari. Heck, my wife does! So, why aren't we supporting it?

Well, sorry to say, there are some bugs in Safari's text editing support. If you're interested in the technical details, here's an example.

On the editor page, we have some toolbars. When you click on the buttons in the toolbar, you want it to change whatever text is selected. But, in Safari, unlike all the other browsers, when you click on that button, it drops the selection in the page before giving control to us. So, there's nothing to change, and all the buttons don't work. This is bug #1.

OK, we can deal with this. We can watch the mouse, and when the mouse moves right over a button, we can grab the selection before you click, and then restore it later. That almost works, but we then hit bug #2: Safari incorrectly reports what the selection is if it's been made by double clicking. If I select the first word of the sentence "Thanks a lot" by dragging, Safari tells me the selection starts at position 0, and goes to position 6, which is OK. But, if I double click, say, right on the 'a' in 'Thanks', Safari tells me that the selection starts and ends at position 3, even though it also tells me the text of the selection is "Thanks". So when I go to restore the selection, it's wrong, and it still doesn't work, only sometimes instead of always.

I don't know how to solve this. I can play some games with collapsing the selection to an endpoint, and moving it around, but they're complicated and they might not work in all cases. I'm asking Apple for help. If anyone reading this has a suggestion, I'd be glad to hear it - you can reply here, or in the feedback form on the Writely site.

So, that's why we're not on Safari yet. It's a nice browser in some ways, but it's missing important stuff that's going to take time to work around. We're trying, and I'm sure we'll get there, but it might take a little while.

Technorati Tag

2005-09-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to add the technorati tag for us to the site: writely.

We're working on some new features and fixes. We've heard loud and clear that Safari support is important, so we're investigating whether the design mode support in Safari 2 is good enough.

We've also heard from folks who want to be able to publish from Writely to a blog, so ATOM support is coming soon. If you have other desired publishing APIs you want us to support, let us know using the feedback form on the site.

Finally, we're starting to work on a web API for Writely, suggestions and requests are welcome. We'll post an initial version of it in a few days.

What do you mean, closed?

2005-09-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

We've heard from a lot of people who want into the Writely beta. So why did we close registration? Simply to ensure that we could provide a good experience for everyone who is already registered. That's always our top priority.

Our user base doubled overnight... and then doubled again... and then tripled... and then tripled again. We've planned for scale, but the overwhelming interest threatend to run ahead of our buildout. Hence, the temporary suspension of new accounts.

The good news is, we're accelerating our scaling plan. If you're already on the waiting list, you should be hearing from us in the next few days. If you haven't signed up yet, well, take a number. We'll reopen registration as soon as the backlog has been cleared. In the meantime, rest assured that if you sign up on the waiting list, we'll get to you sooner rather than later. As Claudia noted in the previous post, you can also get an account by asking someone else to share a document with you.

Quick! Stop the presses!

2005-09-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

Who could have guessed we'd have such an overwhelming response? We thought we'd get a trickle of people, steadily over time, and have no trouble reading all the e-mails and fielding all the questions.

And then: Blammo! In just a week, we already had more than we could handle.

Why the stampede? Is everyone that hungry for an alternative to Microsoft? Is it just an Ajax thing? Or, like us, have folks been searching for a wiki that doesn't feel so much like a theoretical research project? We don't know yet. We're just excited that the technology has reached the point where we can do this thing, and that the market is so ready for it.

So, anyway, the plan is to respond to everyone who has already registered, and to fix the issues that have been reported. We're also going to post a list of features people are asking for, and let you help us hash through it.

BTW, here's a tip: if you're already registered, you can bring new folks in just by sharing a document with them. If you're not, and don't know anyone who is, don't despair -- we'll re-open our beta again very soon. No date yet, but check back here for updates.

Speaking of blogging...

2005-08-31T17:37:00.000-07:00

We've been getting blogged all over the place today!

This is my favorite:
http://www.himysk.com/collaborative-authoring-just-got-easier/

A good description of our site, compelling, well written -- dang! Why can't I write like that?

Spellchecking is here!

2005-08-31T12:37:00.000-07:00

You asked for it -- you got it!

We've added spell-checking (American English only for now) to the Writely document editor. Just click the little icon in the editor toolbar.

We also added Save as Word, new FAQ's, tours, etc.