In a way this has to start out as a story about the power of blogs and RSS. I got the tool I needed, precisely when I needed it and it worked (kind of) all thanks to RSS. Without it everything would be a lot more complicated.

On October 3rd I started working on a translation project with some materials from  the 18th World Petroleum Congress in Johannesburg. I’m not doing this alone so I needed something that would make efficient collaboration possible.
And suddenly, among hundreds of feeds, there was talk of Writeboard, an online tool that lets you write, share, revise and compare text, launched on the day we started the project by a company called  37 Signals. (BTW what’s up with the retro, so early 90’s website?)
Exact same date, I mean, how lucky can you get?

The problem I had to solve was sharing the translated texts between three different computers of my own (one in Ljubljana, the other one in Maribor and a laptop I used on the train, park etc.), plus the one used by my brother in Ljubljana (he’s helping me translate) and our mother, who’s currently in Rotterdam and is the proofreader in this story.
How do we manage large amounts of text that needs to be proofread, edited, formatted and sent to where it needs to go? My first thought was MS Word of course, with track changes option checked it would be close to ideal, but she couldn’t open the files in Rotterdam and we’d still need to send a lot of emails back and forth to keep track of the latest changes.

Writeboard came to the rescue just two days after it was launched. Straight out of the box it solved the problem of easy collaboration.
It can track changes, it can compare different versions of the file, it has some crude form of text formatting and most importanly – it uses RSS feeds to let you know when and where the changes were made to a particular text.

Problems?

1, Text formatting is crap (though effective) with tags instead of a select-click WYSIWYG approach.

2. It would be nice to have an MS Word XML format export feature. Of course you can copy/paste into Word (with formatting recognized) but still – it would be a cool feature

3. (and this is a big one) – You cannot make a folder with all the individual texts listed in one place. I still have to use email for that.

Yes, I admitt, there is  Backpack that lets you do just that but in a very limited way. It only offers 3 !! lousy writeboards per basic/free account. I have 30 or so at the moment. So to keep track I have to email a list of links to each writeboard individually instead of having them listed in a central location for everyone to access with a single login.

I know this isn’t much of a review. To be honest there isn’t much to say. It is what the authors wanted it to be. A simple tool for a simple task. No bloatware.

But nevertheless I can’t help but feel this is a bit of a missed opportunity for them. It could be so much more with just a little bit of extra effort. It could just as easily be effective for larger projects not just one page memos and letters. Just having the option of connecting several writeboards into a single project would help enormously.

I still can’t believe the timing though…