I’m always quite sceptical of a new service or piece of software, especially if it comes from a large company like Google and especially if I already have software (in this case OpenOffice) that essentially does the same thing.
So I’m fairly surprised that I’m surprised about (!) Google Docs, a Word Processor that you can use through your web browser. You’ve probably used the Rich Text editors that have become a staple element of discussion boards, blogs and other websites, allowing you to change the size and style of text, position images and so on? Google Docs builds on that, by adding compatibility with Microsoft Word and other popular document formats as well as some simple features like a word count and a find & replace function. Of course it has one of Google’s now famously sparse but efficient and easy to use interfaces, but I’m sure you can guess that those features alone wouldn’t impress me or invite success.
I admit, I was a little impressed when I gave an overview of google docs on Webradiance, but it wasn’t until I actually used it on a collaborative essay with other students at my University that it proved to be so useful.
Quite simply, you and many others, can edit the same document in real time with Google Docs. It refreshes roughly every 10-20 seconds or whenever you pause in your work and seamlessly allowed 5 of us to work on the same document. I think it was even faster than if we’d been sat next to each other as we could all type, edit and contribute to the document at the same time. We even used an area at the end of the document to communicate with each other as we were writing it. Google docs also keeps a revision history of all the changes made and by whom, so we can look back and retrieve lost content, see who made a change and so on. Doesn’t that sound impressive? Well it is…
…wait! There’s more!
No, not really. I just didn’t want it to turn into an advert for Google docs 
.
Seriously though, it’s the application of something such as Google docs that gets me excited. The technology looked interesting on paper, but actually knowing that it works, saved us time, provided a safety net and was fun is great. My only niggle with it is that it doesn’t work on Opera, but it works in Firefox so I can live with it.