www.nickhodge.com

Hav­ing recently used Google Spread­sheets , and the bet­ter fea­tured Edit­Grid : I thought it best to give Google’s Writely a spin.
As a sid­e­note, I am con­tinu­ally impressed with Edit­Grid. The external Web data tool per­mits auto­mated for­eign exchange rate and stock mar­ket updat­ing. Every minute or so, there is a flash­ing in your spread­sheet as the data; includ­ing Aus­tralian Stocks, are updated. Excel­lent for man­aging a port­fo­lio online.
Back to Writely: this post is writ­ten in Writely: nor­mally I use Mars as my blog editor; and this whole “do it in the cloud” is all pretty new to me.
The data from each of these applic­a­tions: Edit­Grid, Writely, Google Spread­sheets: all live in their own clouds, and inter­chan­ging data is copy and paste from win­dow to win­dow. I also have to restart Fire­fox every couple of days as the memory use grows to 1.5Gb. And no, I have dis­abled all Fire­fox 2.0 exten­sions.
My wish is that data lived in the cloud, too. Applic­a­tions could push/pull data in a stand­ard way from the cloud. We are head­ing in that dir­ec­tion. Flickr is the almost the uni­ver­sal static image storer; You­tube the video stor­age “place”. Will an online virutal-file man­ager that ref­er­ences all these formats, no mat­ter the source, be the next ultra-cool Web 2.0 applic­a­tion?
It looks like Google is start­ing to grok: integ­ra­tion is key.

The HTML from Writely is bad. Lots of br’s; cer­tainly not XHTML compliant.