Google buys Writely, a browser-based word processor.
Update: Ars Technica and The Register have more on this.
From the Writely FAQ:
What does Writely do?
Writely allows you to edit documents online with whomever you choose, and then publish and blog them online.
What exactly can I do with it?
You can:
- Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch).
- Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to format your documents, spell-check them, etc.
- Invite others to share your documents (by e-mail address).
- Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
- View your documents’ revision history and roll back to any version.
- Publish documents online to the world, or to just who you choose.
- Download documents to your desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF*, HTML or zip.
- Post your documents to your blog.
and
How can I get your editor without downloading or installing anything?
Browsers are more powerful these days than some people realize. Powerful enough to allow us to implement traditional word-processing functionality right there in your browser. (Provided, of course, they support Design Mode!)
Another triumph of AJAX technologies.
