Recently I came across an online document editor. (You may see that I have blabbered about it quite a bit in my blog post).

It is called Zoho Writer. I can forsee the decreased dependancy on Microsoft Office and such related softwares. Atleast, there would be decreased dependancy in the Piracy that is rampant with respect to these softwares.

You can do most of the basic stuff that can be done in Microsoft Word©, and apart from that, multiple people can edit the same document. The document can be shared to public also. The Zoho guys have other services up their sleeve - I am trying that out at the moment.

This is pretty cool. I wonder what language they're using to create that. The best feature is that you can save your files online and access it from anywhere. Did you say multiple people can edit a document at the same time? Wouldn't that get all crazy? I'd like to see that in action.
However, I still think the formatting is still quite basic. It doesn't do any auto-formatting/-correcting. Maybe they're afraid that it'd make too many mistakes in guessing what the user wants to do.

What I meant when I said multiple people can edit the same document, I do not mean at the same time - not simaltaneously. More than one people can edit the documents at seperate times.

Ohh, that meas sence. Otherwise... that WOULD get really crazy!! Zoho is free (the majority of it is, at least) so I think I might check it out a little more sometime. My Microsoft Office trial ran out about two weeks ago.

Thanks!

I believe Zoho Writer is written in AJAX, which uses XML and Javascript on the client side to provide both access to the backend and interactivity of the UI. However, I still prefer my desktop version of Microsoft Office 2007 over any web-based office tools, since I find desktop ones have better functionality and are easier to use in general.

Zoho is certainly nice. In fact, I'd venture to say that it works better than Google Docs. It's got the sharing functionality and it's also got a lot of the features from desktop-based office systems like Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, unlike Google Docs, which actually lacks quite a few features. (Though, I recently checked out GoogleDocs again, and it seems to have improved compared to what I'd seen a while ago...gotta keep up with the new updates, I guess)

Anyways, I must agree with Atomic0, though, as desktop-based office systems tend to run a lot faster than web-based ones. Also, sometimes my internet is sporadic, so I'd much prefer to still be able to work on my documents when that occurs. Finally, by using a web-based office system, I'm also depending on someone else's servers to be up. While Google's is usually quite reliable (and, in my experience, so has Zoho's), it would still frustrate me if I had a deadline to meet and my service of choice wasn't up.

There's also another online office system called ThinkFree. However, the difference between ThinkFree and Zoho and Google Docs is that ThinkFree is Java-based rather than AJAX-based. So, although ThinkFree has quite a bit more functionality than either GoogleDocs or Zoho (it's actually quite similar to a fully-fledged desktop Office system), it lacks speed and tends to slow my computer down a lot with its applets. So, all in all, I'd still prefer to stick to OpenOffice and Microsoft Office instead of online office apps. If, on the other hand, Javascript could run a lot faster than its current speed, I might consider making the jump.