Google have atlast taken Writely and ‘Googleized’ it. Writely.com now points at docs.google.com, and has been given the Google UI that will be familiar to users of Google Mail, Google Reader and Google Spreadsheet. In fact this posting is indeed from Google Docs.
At first glance it appears ot have pretty much the same functionality as Writely did. One thing I noticed almost immediately is that Google Docs doesn’t look asthough it’s written in ASP.NET anymore. This isn’t a surprise but when you do a ‘view source’ of the code you see some interesting URl’s such as:
/leftly/javascript/async.js?v=w2
Is ‘leftly’ a comedy take on Writely? Methinks that the Google developers are having some fun here. I do like the Google UI, it’s clean and crisp and still retains all of what was good in Writely. It is now possible to leap between Docs and Spreadsheet (spreadsheet opening in a new browser window) although Google Calendar still asks me to authenticate again.
So Google Docs is here in all of it’s collaborative, blog posting, PDF saving, autosaving, glory.
Having been in a lengthy session with Microsoft today about Office 2007 System I can honestly say that I don’t think my company will be making the leap. However as a home user I could consider using this tool to blog. The collaborative function in Google Docs provides an advantage over such client tools as Windows Live Writer. Both tools still seem to have issues with formatting of text from time to time (not quite as bad as the WordPress WYSIWYG editor) so I’m torn between which one to use. Google Docs obviously works on my Mac too, as it is a browser delivered application and appears to work equally well in whatever browser I use. For now I think I’ll stick to Live Writer. But Google Docs is a very impressive browser delivered Word Processor, all be it Writely in Google clothing.
One thing though Google. When testing the posting to blog ability in Google Docs this dialogue box appears:
So there are some last vestiges of Writely in there. 
Google Docs is a great demonstration of what a browser delivered application can do. But so is Microsoft Outlook Web Access and that’s been around for years.
Is this application significant enough to change the way that people use Word Processing? Well no. But it does bring to the masses some of the features that have been available in MS Word for a long time. It’s very feature light, but then again is this all that some people need?