Since Writely was acquired by Google earlier this year, it has been closed for new sign-ups.
Having finished moving to the Google infrastructure, Writely has just reeoped and is again accepting new sign-ups.
So what’s the fuzz about.
Writely is a web-based Word processor, that allows for online collaboration on documents, and it supports uploads in a number of file-formats. It did however fail accepting my first attempt at an upload, of what I consider a very simple document, somewhat disappointing, but I’ve written Writely support.
It’s somewhat annoying that Writely suggested that I send feedback along with the “offending” document using an e-mail address link, only to receive an e-mail, telling me that this method of providing feedback had been closed.
With Writely again open for sign-ups, and with the Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Spreadsheet and Google Calendar offerings in place, Google is getting ready to join the “office productivity tool wars”, all that I’m really missing is a decent address-book.
But you know what I really miss? A true NFS, a Networking File System.
The NFS should:
- Easily plug into any application (e.g. OS level support)
- Automatically detect if I’m connected to the network, performing continous background uploads if I’m online, otherwise it should save to my local disk
- Make it possible to work on the documents online using a standard browser
- Allow for both on- and offline collaboration “wikistyle”
- Be highly secure
- Last, but not least, be standards based
Right now everybody is reinventing the wheel, building their own custom filesystems, due to the lack of a true NFS.
Is there a true NFS on the market, that would meet my specification? I have no idea, but I doubt it very much. YouOS is a promising idea, but not ready for prime-time, and it’s not exactly standards based, attempting to provide an online version of a closed OS.