If you have a gmail account, you may have already noticed (and used) Google Docs. For the un-initiated, Gmail users who frequent the gmail webpage will find a link called Docs & Spreadsheets in a tiny bar along the top of the browser window. While the Docs & Spreadsheets page seems to be a unified offering, the Docs portion and the spreadsheet portion are actually very different programs that Google has aquired over the last year and worked to integrate.

Docs comes from the Writely project begun by a small start-up named Upstartle and was integrated into Google accounts as a beta program in September, 2006, and this post is only about that portion of the software.
The following was penned in Google Docs. It was my first document there, though now I keep several documents there for notes on various operating systems, programs, and computers that I need to access from different locations, PCs, and OS platforms frequently. I output the document as HTML and pasted it in here, so we’ll see how portable that is.

First Google Doc

This is an example of a document written using Google’s online document tool (which used to be Writely). The scariest thing about it is that Google can choose to index anything I write and make that available to the CIA. I am completely aghast at Google’s coziness with the government and the erosion of their privacy stance since they went public, and it’s almost enough for me to stop using their (free) service. It does work pretty well though.

Some reasons why this is cool

1. You can access your documents anywhere
2. You can share your documents with others online and collaborate
3. You don’t have to worry about backing up your stuff since Google is taking care of that
4. Built in revision history, and since you can share your documents, you can easily review changes by others, you can compare between any two revisions just like on a wiki, or as if the document was in a CVS repository.
5. Exportable to Word when you get someplace where you need to do more with the document
6. Google search for docs works like Google on the web only for your document creations

Some reasons why this sucks

1. Privacy concerns
2. Possibility that you won’t be able to access your documents given the vagaries of internet connectivity
3. Limitations of the program:
   • Speed and access? (though it’s working pretty quick right now)
   • Mail merges not possible?
   • Labels not possible?
   • Templates not possible?

I’m not sure how to use this system fully yet, but it seems really powerful. Potentially devastating to Microsoft in a big way.