Writely and Web 2.0

Anyone who has been watching web development for a while will recognize the excitement around the so-called "Web 2.0." "This is it!" they exclaim. "This will finally realize the promise of the web!" As with most things technological, it isn't quite that simple, but at the same time, there is a great deal to be said for the dramatic improvement in the usability of web-based applications, especially recently.

One of the most remarkable Web 2.0 success stories is the Writely word processor, which has been acquired by Google. Writely is a C# application, written on the .NET platform. It has been widely recognized for its useful feature set and the fact that, well, it works. A real honest word processor that can be used in a web browser? Yep. Why, it can even do PDFs!

One of the key themes of web development for years has been the prediction that one day people will be able to use real applications on the web, and "free" themselves from the desktop. This was one of the primary causes of the great "browser wars" following the introduction of the Java programming language. Utopia, developers claimed, was a simple matter of combining Java and any old web browser. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite that simple.

There was also the "virtual reality" web, where pages wouldn't just consist of text and illustration, but web pages would be entire "worlds" constructed in the Virtual Reality Modeling Language or VRML. The browser plug-in worked, sort of. Cubes, spheres and cones could be links to other pages, sort of. Then, well, the whole idea sort of wasn't quite that simple.

The best the web could do, for the most part, was e-mail, and that it did very well, even without the new Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX. E-mail didn't really require anything spectacular in the way of user interfaces, or if it did offer anything more advanced than "subject" and "address" boxes, it could likely be handled with a simple database and set of server-side components. For e-mail, at least, a web "application" was that simple, and for one basic reason.

Web applications have been hamstrung by a lack of consistency in the standards for user interfaces. Adobe's Flash and Sun's Java succeeded in part because they were able, through the use of their own internally consistent platforms, to overcome the inconsistent world of the web UI. Even something as simple as a menu, until recently, had to be implemented with a healthy dose of arcanery, combining markup, style sheets and scripting. Web developers had to throw together something seemingly different every time.

But the Web UI really isn't so much of a problem any more, and it is for this reason that extraordinarily capable applications like Writely are not only becoming possible, but becoming realities. It is now possible to build a simple word processor that runs in a web browser, just like it is possible to build a calendar application too.

"Nonsense!" claim the naysayers. "Writely can't be more than a toy! Behold Word, mightiest of the mighty! Surely Writely can't compare to its massive features!" Of course Writely can't compare to Word. Microsoft Word has been in development for decades. But, again, it's not quite that simple.

The difference is that for most people, all they really want to do is sit down and write a document. They might want to save in a different format. They might want to share that document with someone else. They need simple spellchecking and fonts. That's about it. They don't need to mail merge the OLE macro to connect to the data center server so they can propogate chronological changes to the entire library of document templates through an LDAP index. It's just a letter. New. Write. Print. Save. Done. It's often quite amusing how many applications seem to be far more concerned with plotting an elliptical orbital approach to Neptune than they are with just allowing people to do a simple task like write and print a letter.

It is for these tasks, at least currently, that Web 2.0 applications like Writely succeed most impressively, and with the forthcoming advent of new mobile devices like the iPhone, which provide a real web interface, the power and utility of these new applications will only increase.

When one takes a closer look at Writely, the first noticeable thing is its simplicity. The entire presentation of Writely, and many applications like it, is simple, simple, simple. This is definitely a good thing(tm), because simple indicates an emphasis on user and usability instead of techno-gee-whiz, which has often distracted projects like these. Beyond that, it's so similar to just about any other basic document editing program that it probably won't need much in the way of introduction.

"So they just remove anything complex? Is that all?" Again, it isn't that simple. It isn't just that Writely removes the complex: it removes the unnecessary, and therefore the complex usually gets removed automatically. There are probably ten thousand things Word or OpenOffice can do, for example, that Writely can't, but nobody notices because only about four people need those features. The vast thronging masses just want to write documents.

Writely supports a number of features that emphasize "web" as well. It supports HTML natively, and even has an e-mail interface for users to upload documents. Writers can publish RSS feeds of their documents, and post to a variety of blogging platforms. Most of these features can be used without ever leaving the document interface. Documents can have tags and embedded images as well.

It also allows documents to be published in PDF or RTF formats, which by itself scores major points for usability, and has a change-tracking feature which task for task is probably at the moment the most valuable collaboration tool for a office document-editing platform. Writely also supports permissions on documents, so users can be granted edit or read-only access.

Writely stores documents on the server instead of the client, so no matter which computer a user logs in from, all of their documents are there. For people working from a variety of machines or locations, this can be amazingly important. Most mobile computer users have almost certainly at least once discovered an empty space where the "document civilization will crumble without" should be but isn't.

Printing support in Writely apparently started somewhat iffy, and there were still reported "issues" as recently as a few months ago. Then again, printers and computers have always existed in pretty much seperate worlds anyway. Great volumes of paper have been consumed only to discover that word processor documents such as letters are inexplicably set to print in landscape format on 11x17 paper by default, and that great effort must be expended to persuade the printer to just use the letter-sized paper.

One of the greatest technology success stories is the UNIX operating system. Outside of programmers, computer scientists and Mac users, UNIX probably isn't generally understood, but it is an example of one of the most vital concepts of successful engineering: In UNIX, each program does one thing, and does it with maximum speed and efficiency, using the smallest amount of memory possible. By combining these tiny super-efficient programs, it is possible to do incredibly complex data processing on a UNIX system without a single mouse click. With new web-applications like Writely, it would seem that the "Web 2.0" world is using the same approach, and if they generate a similar level of success, it is very good news indeed for both Writely users and the web as well.