Google acquires Writely

Big news today as a very cool product, writely.com (owned by Upstartle LLC) gets acquired by Google (http://writely.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-yep-google.html).  Google now owns an extremely well implemented web 2.0 based word processor. Writely has many uses but one of writely’s powerful capabilities is letting users collaborate on the same document in real time.  Now you can maintain one source of truth when taking meeting notes over a teleconference. Writely helps keep everyone on the same page (pun fully intended.) 

There will be lots of talk about Google pushing into Microsoft’s space.  But I think the most exciting possibilities is if Google makes writely available for mash-ups.  How nice if you can have a collaborative word processing environment to embed in other web applications. Tie this in with Gtalk and cool things start to happen.