Web 2.0 Boom Alive and Well: Google Acquires Writely

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Thursday, March 16, 2006; 07:44 AM

Search giant Google has acquired Upstartle, which produces the collaborative word processor Writely.  This week information about the acquisition appeared on both the Writely website and an official Google blog.

Although a minor bussiness move for a company like Google, the acquisition signifies the continued interest in web applications with a collaborative flavour and a sleek user interface.  Amongst Google's past acquisitions is Blogger, a popular weblog service.  Last year Yahoo acquired Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site.  The Web 2.0 phenomenon seems to be doing just fine.

Analysts predict that Google may be headed for the creation of an online office productivity suite.  No official word from Google yet; future acquisitions may add more weight to such a theory.

Writely is created with AJAX, and is probably the most popular web-based word processing application.  It keeps versions of your documents as you work on them, it saves automatically every few seconds, and it has all the standard word processing features including a spell checker (although not instantaneous). Because it is web based, documents can be accessed from any computer. Another advantage to a web based word processor is that a single document can be accessed by multiple people for review and collaboration.

Writely, which is still in beta, started in August 2005.  Not unlike Google Pages, it is currently closed to new users and instead registers them on a waiting list.