Here’s another online word processing and document sharing application, Zoho Writer. Just giving the demo user version a quick spin. It’s a free, AJAX application, with full WYSIWYG controls and several MS Word-like features. The interface is quick and intuitive and the app kindly auto-saves everything you do. It will draw obvious comparisons with Writely, but I’m not familiar enough with the features of either to draw any conclusions or preferences. I’ve added a few tags to this post (AJAX, PR, Zoho Writer, Writely) to see whether they come through.

As with Writely, you can post to your blog (Typepad, Blogger, LiveJournal – but not WordPress.com or any custom APIs), and while it pulls down the names of your various hosted blogs, it doesn’t access the categories, which you’ll need to do separately.

I like the app though and again, the potential here for multiple authors to edit the same document is attractive for communicators. You’d have to test the security and it may not be robust or customizable enough for large companies or  PR firms, but if I were a freelancer, who worked from lots of locations with a broad clutch of clients, I think I might take a serious look at this.

UPDATE: Ok so as I published the post from Zoho Writer it briefly flashed up a message saying ‘Error in blog publishing’, but didn’t say what that was. Seems the post itself was published, but the tags were stripped off. I’m editing this now back in ecto, the desktop posting app, and will manually enter the categories and those tags once again. It’s not really a criticism though since these apps aren’t designed to be blog apps like Performancing, they’re word processing apps, and they do that very well.

Technorati Tags: AJAX, PR, Writely, Zoho Writer