DoingText: Easy Collaboration
November 5th, 2008 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 2 Comments
You can probably already think of a bunch of different ways to collaborate with your web-working co-workers on editing a piece of text: emailing drafts, wikis, instant messages, online word processors like Google Documents or Zoho Writer. DoingText is a new entrant in this crowded field, hoping to gain some interest by making the process as low-friction as possible.
The idea behind DoingText is simple: you launch a new discussion by pasting a chunk of text to their site. From there, you get a dedicated editing window that lets you make changes. The editing window understands the Textile markup language, so adding things like bold and italic and hyperlinks is simple.
With the discussion you also get a URL that you can share with anyone. You can make the URL password-protected if you want. Anyone with the URL (and password, if necessary) can edit the text too: the system tracks revisions, and allows for comments and color-highlighting.
When the text is in a final state, you can download it as text or PDF, or create an online presentation from it. Things work smoothly, and as long as you don’t mind editing in a markup language, it’s easy to figure out how DoingText works. Currently the site is in closed beta, though it only took me a day or two to get invited after applying.
2 Comments Post your own comment
Melvyn says: November 6th, 2008 12:18am
Why would I use this instead of GoogleDocs/Zoho? What’s the unique element?
alex says: November 6th, 2008 4:37am
thanks for that post. to answer the question from the first comment: number one: sharing is much easier as your collaborators don’t need an account/invitation. second: the communication part (which I think is the core of all collaboration) is better, for example you can leave comments on every paragraph without destroying the original text (which happens with google’s inline comments. also if you are a bit paranoid about giving your secrets to a data collecting company like google you might sleep better :) if you wanna see more just try it out :)