2005-10-03 Web

I like Writeboard’s scope (sharing single pages of text on the web, no markup, diff, private or public) and design (small, elegant).

Writeboard

Like very very simple one-page wikis, private or public at your discretion. But I like their FAQ:

*Is this some sort of wiki?**: No way. Not at all. Nope. Wikis are icky. Writeboard is about writing and editing solo or with others. It’s all about the words. Wikis are about way more than that which is why they are generally pretty confusing to most folks. ¹

Aaaargh! The verdict has been spoken.

They /do/ use formatting rules. 🙂

It is interesting to note that both services provide text-editing for free. I really think this kind of thing should push MS Word over the edge. I use MS Word at work practically every day for specifications. The entire /concept/ of Word documents sucks. (Note that MS Word in itself has gotten a lot better than it used to be ten years ago.) The concept sucks because it is unwieldy, complex, bizarre, byzantine, opaque, and confusing. The sad thing is that I often feel that most other people I know who don’t know anything but Word are much worse Word users than I am. And I don’t even like it!

Anyway. Compare Writeboard pricing with Writely:

Writely

*Writely plans**: Our plan is to have the basic service be free, but extras will require a reasonable subscription fee. As we add those extra features to the site, we will include some kind of indication that they will be subscription-only in the future. We will also be charging license fees to corporations, partners, and for custom installations. ²

*Writeboard**: Writeboard is completely free. You can create as many writeboards as you’d like and invite as many people to collaborate on the writeboards. There are no limits. ³

*Word 2003**: New User Price – $229 US ⁴

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I like how Writeboard doesn’t promise any new features.

I would like this to be FreeSoftware, and would totally hope that they would succeed by selling services alone.

FreeSoftware

Just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding. I don’t like it because it is somehow part of the “Web 2.0”. I don’t like it because it somehow uses AJAX (does it?). I like /simple design/. SimpleSoftwareDesign, actually...

SimpleSoftwareDesign

I gave it a try. Check it out. The password is “alex”.

Check it out

They offer a RSS feed…

I see that the feed is currently invalid: //pubDate must be an RFC-822 date// ⁵

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On the other hand the UTF-8 decoding bug is probably mine. Damn. :/