- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 10 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
2.0 stars
"Everyone is missing the point"
Pros: tagging, collaboration, sharing via e-mail, blog or web site, simple word processing
Cons: you have to share each file individually, there is no provsision to sync with other users in order to seamlessly share file with few or no clicks, no files
Summary: I certainly do not see this as a substitution for Word or any other text processing application. I was excited by the potential it has to allow the users to enter their text once on their desk top or with in the Writely web site and then share these documents for viewing and/or collaboration with other registered users. It is also supposed to allow you to post your documents to your personal web site or blog. I also hoped it would allow other users to share their documents with my Writely site. HOWEVER, this is not the case. If this was supposed to be a simple word processor available on-line, then great, I guess someone would find that usefull, but aren't there plenty of those? It is the potential for Writely to do for document sharing and collaboration what Yahoo Photos Beta portends to do for photo sharing that had me excited. I currently use the Yahoo Photos Beta and even though it needs improvments, it is already a joy to use. It has managed to include both tagging and files, batch up-loading, batch editing and tagging, and sharing is abreeze. Once I enter the e-mail addresses of my "preferred/allowed" choices to the list, and they have added me, their photos automatically show up on my site and mine show up on theirs. They can download full resolution files of my photos to their desk tops and edit them if I have allowed this as well. As it stands now , to share documents with Writely I have to select them one by one, go to the screen to view it alone, click on collaborate, click on or enter the e-mail address of each of the collaborators or viewers(more choices and clicks!),answer the pop up query as to whether I want an e-mail sent to those addresses with a link to that single document, close that screen and then share the next document. And when they receive the e-mailed link, they can only view the one document. In order to look at others they have to close that window go back to their email and click on another link. Let's see, how many clicks is that? I think it is at least 7-8. I expected this to save me time and not annoy my friends and colleagues, however at the moment the inverse is true. I don't have the time or patience to go through the sharing process with that many selections for each document and I know my friends and colleagues don't want to receive that many individual links to documents.
I know this is not a review of Yahoo Photo Beta; my point is I have been hoping someone would offer the same thing for word processing,sharing and collaboration. I expected more from Google even if this is still a Beta. Hopefully they will make these changes soon. I can think of so many uses for a well thought out and executed
site.
