“Writely”:http://www.writely.com is incredible. I’m not sure if I’m doing myself a tiny disservice by posting this here, because the servers can’t possibly remain as fast as they are after the site catches on like wildfire and their userbase (all your userbase are belong to us) explodes. This is combined with the fact that while editing a document, it auto-saves itself back to the server every ten seconds, which must generate a gazillion (not quite a googol, although note that Google recently bought Writely) hits. Anyway, in the span of a couple days, I’m now keeping track of almost everything in Writely documents. For work, I can create a document for each project we’re working on and type notes related to the project; my coworkers can read and maintain their own notes simultaneously. Finding and opening documents is also much faster than doing so within the operating system, since they’re all just right there in one place and there’s no Word-like startup time; a document just loads in a new window/tab right away. There’s no Word-like concept of a printed page or page-width forced on you; the default typing mode is much like opening a blank Notepad.exe instance and typing in it. Although unlike Notepad, Writely saves often and makes it easy to manage files. I haven’t relied much on the automatic revision tracking feature yet, but I’m sure that’ll come in handy down the line, too.

Incidentally, I just noticed something interesting. I’m typing this, you might imagine, in Writely itself. I’m using Firefox and happen to have Firebug enabled. So I see the periodic POST requests being sent to the server to support the ten-second autosave. Instead of saving my whole document, each request sends just the text I’ve added or changed since last autosave. Of course you know it has to work that way when you think about it, but I wouldn’t have thought to think about something like that in the first place.