This post has been ported into LCB from a new collaborative writing tool that is currently in beta called writely. Harold Jarche gave it a nice write up on his his blog inspiring me to take a look at it. The functionality is very intuitive and seems to combine the best of word processing and wiki technologies to create a collaborative platform. Currently it struggles with some issues around formatting (trying to fix a table that was messed up in the upload from Word was a real mess), but they do make it clear that you're using a beta. The ability to collaborate with as many people as you wish on a document by document basis is great. I see the following functions as real positives:

• That you can post out to most blogs

• bring content to writely by email, upload, or original creation,

• download into Word, HTML,

• all with revision history and the ability to revert to previous versions at the click of a button.

I agree with Harold, this is definitely the future for use today.