Om Malik writes about Sphere, a new blog search service that appears to be getting ready to launch.

Sphere is taking a crack at building a more relevant blog search engine. Traditional link analysis just doesn’t work with blog posts because new posts don’t have time to gather links. Instead, Sphere seems to be be trying to determine blog authority on a given subject area, and determine new authoritative blogs based on who those blogs point to.

From Sphere’s Learn More page:

What makes us better than existing blog search sites?

It starts with relevant results and fast performance. Our new relevance-based algorithm discovers new blog posts as they’re created, indexes them within minutes of being published, applies rich semantic analysis and makes them searchable by relevance or time. Plus, we’ve got a few fun, helpful features that we think make for a richer user experience.

Of course, there is no way to tell if Sphere has cracked the blog search relevance problem until they launch. I’m looking forward to finding out.

Thanks Richard for pointing me to this.

Product: Google Reader
Launched: October 7, 2005

Google launched a web-based ajax RSS reader yesterday at Web2.0. The coverage saturated Memeorandum.

Unlike Bloglines, which uses frames to avoid page refreshes, Google Reader uses Ajax. The reader is visually stunning and at first glance appeared to be a contender. However, upon further review we’ve found what we consider to be some serious structural flaws.

The reader loads quickly and uses your stored gmail credentials to sign you in. Adding feeds is fairly easy via opml upload (which we did) or using the search bar. As you add feeds you have the option of adding tags (called “labels”). Individual posts are listed on the left - clicking on a post brings up the content in the view box on the right.

Google Reader is actually Google’s second RSS reader. See Google IG as well, which Google launched in late July. Unlike Google IG, which targets light RSS users who only read a few feeds, their new reader is targeted at those who want to move through a lot of feeds quickly.

What Google Reader Does Well

There are a lot of positive features.

The reader uses ajax quite effectively to avoid page refreshes and to create a great visual experience.

Feeds can be tagged, and individual posts can be kept unread and starred.

The search functionality is excellent, and adding feeds requires no knowledge of RSS, opml or XML. It’s all automatic. Search only pulls up feeds you aren’t already subscribed to.

What Google Reader Is Doing Wrong

As I mentioned above, Google Reader is targeting heavy RSS readers. The product isn’t useful, however, for moving through a large number of feeds efficiently.

Posts are listed in order of “relevance” (which doesn’t seem to actually sort things in any relevant way), or by date. I need posts to be grouped under the individual blog because I read some feeds first - Google Reader doesn’t allow me to do this and I am frustrated trying to find the authors I like to read the most. There is no search functionality within feeds already subscribed to, so there is no way to find this content.

The reader is slow. Paging down through posts results in a long and unacceptable delay. As a side note, importing my OPML list took about 10 minutes. Since this was a one-time cost, it’s not that big of a deal.

Since this is a web-based reader only, there is no syncronization.

Google uses ajax instead of frames. While frames is an old technology, readers using it allow for multiple scroll bars - this means you can keep the feed frames locked while scrolling through individual posts. This needs to be addressed.

There is no unsubscribe button for feeds.

Google Reader is optimized for Firefox. It isn’t working properly on other browsers yet.

Summary

Many of the feature limitations can be addressed, but Google Reader has a long way to go if it is going to seriously threaten existing heavy-duty RSS readers. Brad Hill also posts a lengthy review of Google Reader.

Edgeio is a company that Keith Teare, Vidar Hokstad, Matt Kaufman, Fred Oliveira and I have been working on for most of this year.

It willl be launching in the near future. If you’d like to be notified of the launch, please give us your email on the temporary landing page.

Edgeio will give you the ability to do new and (we think) really exciting things with your blog. If you have a weblog and you’d like to be part of early testing, there is a field for giving us your blog address as well.

Edgeio will also have its own blog soon with more details.

Our OPML experiment with Dave Winer (listen to Dave’s podcast here too) has captured the attention of a bunch of people, and new applications to leverage directories of blogs are being created by some really smart people.

Here’s what we have so far:

1. On September 29, 2005, I created the OPML directory of TechCrunch posts that you can see on the sidebar of Scripting.com. This was easily done with the OPML Editor and is updated daily.
2. Later that night, Niall Kennedy created a Moveable Type template to do this automatically.
3. Matt Mullenweg did the same for Wordpress.
4. Today we heard from Kosso that he’s created a flash widget to display the directory (image to left) and has placed it in the right sidebar of his blog. It has a great design and avoids page refreshes of the orginal box on Dave’s site.

As soon as I can find the time I am going to implement Matt’s wordpress plugin to output our posts automatically, and with Kosso’s permission put his his widget out our site to replace our basic category system on the right sidebar.

OPML is awesome.

Verisign has confirmed their acquisition of the Weblogs.com ping server network and related assets. See the Verisign blog post here as well.

We aren’t going to write a lot about it here on TechCrunch because Keith Teare and I were advisors to Weblogs.com on the deal. I will say that I believe this is a game-changing event for the blogosphere.

Dave Winer, the founder of Weblogs.com and the inventor of blog ping servers tells the story here (and kindly mentions our involvement).

If you’d like to understand more about ping servers, I wrote a profile of Weblogs.com in July of this year.

For more coverage, you should also read Jason Kottke, Staci Kramer, Robert Scoble and Michael Bazeley.

Congratulations, Dave. You deserve this, my friend.

Here’s the second set of companies that presented at the Web 2.0 conference Launchpad workshop. See Part 1 here.

Zvents

My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff.

KnowNow

Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week.

Orb

Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though.

Wink

Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”.

Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow.

Allpeers

Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently.

Flock

Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again.

But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week.

PubSub

Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here.

The Web 2.0 conference kicked off today with a number of great workshops. The highlights for us were the Attention Trust board meeting (posts below) and, of course, the Launchpad workshop where a dozen companies presented in an hour and a half.

My notes on each company are below. Many of these have been profiled here before, and we hope to get full profiles of the rest up as soon as we can schedule interviews with the teams (if you’d like to talk to me, I’m the guy with a huge TechCrunch sticker on my laptop) (Jeff Clavier also has a TechCrunch sticker on his laptop, but I’m not French, so you’ll know its not me ).

I’m breaking this down into two posts to keep it manageable. Here’s Part 1. Part 2 is here.

Social Text

Ross Mayfield spoke about wikiwyg, the first wysiwyg editor for wikis. He says its much more than a tool for wikis, however. It’s and “open source synchronous editor for the web” and his vision is that it will be used on many web applications beyond wikis. Want to try out Social Text for free? Mention web2con at socialtext and get a free five-user wiki for a year.

Rollyo

Dave Pell presented Rollyo, the roll-your-own search engine (profile).

You can create a mini-search engine from only those sites you trust or feel have relevant content, and then search against that personal search. He used a travel search example that was quite compelling - searching against just fodors, travelpost and frommers. Saved searches can be private, or public and shared with others.

Joyent

David Young talked about Joyent, a compelling network suite for small groups and companies that includes mail, calendar, contacts, files, etc., and allows developers to mash up systems on their data. Lots of tagging and “smart filters”. Open APIs to allow third party apps. Take the tour here.

bunchball

Rajat Paharia showed off his super-cool flash platform BunchBall. Rajat was also nice enough to give me a personal presentation earlier in the day. Rajat talked about how developers need both infrastructure and distribution to get applications out. BunchBall provides both - a slick flash platform (Flash 8 is required for some applications) along with open APIs, and new third party applications are automatically distributed accross the platform.

Current applications include a number of games and photo-sharing. Rajar also says that Metaliq is creating a multi user texas holdem game, to be released soon.

Check this one out. And contrary to rumors, Rajat did NOT beat me at tic-tac-toe while giving me the demo. He lies.

RealTravel

Ken Leeder talked about his new company, RealTravel. It’s centralized user content with some really sweet tagging and search/find capabilities .

The idea is to leverage user content and social networking to create a personalized experience for travel shoppers and a more effective venue for travel industry marketeres. THus, hopefully, breaking the death spiral that the online travel industry is now in: a race to the lowest price.

Zimbra

Satish Dharmara gave an absolutely stellar presentation of Zimbra (profile), although to be honest Zimbra is so damn cool and full of AJax awesomeness that he could have stood there and babbled and the audience would still have cheered.

Zimbra is an “open source enterprise-scalable collaboration server with intelligent online backup and single mailbox restore. It has hierarchical storage management”. What does this mean? You can’t run it from the Zimbra website, but you can install it on your own server. It’s Outlook as it’s supposed to be.

Read our profile. It (Zimbra, not our profile) rocks. Demo here.

There are reports that AOL has acquired Weblogs, Inc. and will officially announce it later this week. The acquisition price, including earnouts, is reported to be $20-35 million.

Weblogs, Inc., founded by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey was launched just two years ago and is funded by Mark Cuban. Calacanis has reported a revenue run rate of about $2 million.

Congratulations to all of the bloggers and employees of Weblogs, Inc. There are a number of additional public/private acquisition deals that will be announced this month as well.

I’m sitting in the Attention Trust public board meeting at the Web 2.0 conference and getting more details on their announcements discussed below.

Everything is centered around the Attention Trust Recorder Firefox extension (they’re calling it ATX). Once installed, if you turn it on, it monitors your click stream. ATX also tells you if the site you are on is Attention Trust approved, and has controls to turn the recorder on and off.

The data can be stored locally and/or shared with any number of trusted parties if you so choose. Attention Trust insists that companies using the data adhere to the Attention Trust principles.

This information is incredibly valuable, of course, particularly when aggregated with others. Virtually any online company will be interested in this data, and will invent creative ways to incentivize customers to share their attention data with them.

Search engines are the obvious example…knowing what sitex you’ve been to, and how long you’ve stayed, is extraordinarily useful in creating more relevant search results.

So once again, the basic flow:

1. companies agree to principles (users own their own data and attention)
2. consumers download recorder (firefox extension) that tracks clickstream
3. recorder can be turned on or off at any time
4. consumers may share data with any or no approved companies
5. companies will incentivize users to share data

AttentionTrust (profile) announced a number of updates to its service today.

The underlying philosophy of this nonprofit corporation is described in Seth GoldStein and Greg Yardley’s post on the Attention Trust blog.

In addition to a new look and feel to the site, AttentionTrust has also releaseed the Attention Trust Recorder, a Firefox extension that records your browsing history and saves it both to your desktop and to the Attention Trust service, where you can choose to share parts of it with trusted service providers.

From the FAQs:

Q: What does the Attention Recorder save and share?

A: For each web page you visit, the Attention Recorder will save the web page’s URL, the web page’s title, the HTTP response code, and whether that web page read or wrote any cookies to were cookies. (The contents of those cookies we don’t record.)

You can see exactly what the Attention Recorder sends by selecting Tools > Attention Recorder Options, selecting the Approved Services tab, and then selecting ‘Local Storage’ as an Attention Service. The same information the Attention Recorder sends will then be written to your hard drive. For a more technical discussion of the Attention Recorder, see http://www.attentiontrust.org/extension/spec.

Q: How do I select which Approved Services to send my information to?

A: Your initial selection can be made from this page - by selecting an Approved Service from the list and downloading the extension from that Approved Service’s Attention Trust page, you’ll automatically begin sending your information to that service. In the future, you can edit which Attention Banks receive your information by going to Tools > Attention Recorder Options, selecting the Approved Services tab, and then changing your selections.

Steve Gillmor will be talking more about Attention Trust today at a 1:30 Web 2.0 Conference session. Updates then.

I met with Geoffrey Arone and Chris Messina at Flock headquarters in Palo Alto yesterday to see the new Flock browser. Flock is expanding the beta group from a hundred or so individuals to a couple of thousand today.

We begged a beta invitation to Flock a while back and wrote about it in a profile written on August 26, 2005

There have been significant improvements since then. The blogging tool is even slicker than it was before, with incredibly easy flickr integration, blog editing (dual pane with code/wysiwyg viewers) and other features.

Bookmarks are now integrated with del.icio.us, which just makes so much more sense than their original idea of creating a separate social bookmarking product.

Flock is looking like a very powerful and very beautiful product.

Flock Offices

The Flock offices are literally in a garage off of University Ave in Palo Alto. Most people were awake and coding when we stopped by in the early afternoon. Andy Smith, pictured left, was the lone exception. Garage, sleeping engineers, cases of Red Bull…a true startup is a wonderful thing.

Business Week Essay

Make sure you read Rob Hof’s Flock essay on Business Week. It’s…very complete.

Company: zvents
Launched: Today
Previous Profile: September 26, 2005
Location: Menlo Park, CA

The zvents team took the wrapper off their social event manager/calendar today. The timing of the announcement couldn’t be better, as Upcoming.org (a competitor) announced its acquisition by Yahoo yesterday.

Ethan Stock posted about the launch on the zvents blog. Key features include best of breed event search, tagging of events, easy blogging and blog/website widgets to promote your event. zvents uses ajax intelligently and the site feels very stable.

Zvents is also opening up a number of APIs to grab their data, encouraging mashups. We applaud them and look forward to developments.

This is clearly not a Google Ajax Office suite, which was widely anticipated. And as far as we could tell, the Webcast links never worked. Overall, a big disappointment. People wasted an incredible amount of time yesterday on this non story, which basically boils down to people being given the option of downloading Google’s toolbar in addition to JRE or Open Office. snooooooooooooze.

Ning, also known as the official name for 24 Hour Laundry’s project, just launched. I actually had to keep myself from posting early because I was excited about it. Now that I got the word from them with the approval to post, here goes the unveiling.

Ning is, and I quote, “a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications. Social apps are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people”.

So, what does this mean for the global audience? A whole lot. It means anyone can now get their ideas out there and build a project (some people would call it a mash-up) in a few clicks, with no developer experience. And if you are a developer, you can pop under the hood and change it to your liking, no questions asked.

The reason why I’m excited about it is simple: allowing people to build cool new stuff that they normally wouldn’t (empowering the users) is one of the best things you can do on the Web 2.0 space. If you think about it, back when blogging started it was also about allowing people to do things they weren’t able to before - publish content online. This is it, all over again, but instead of blogs, you get to build cool apps.

This being said, get out there and try it. And we at TechCrunch definitely want to see what you come up with too, so drop us a note if you’re using Ning to build cool stuff. To the 24 Hour Laundry guys: congratulations for the launch!

24 Hour Laundry launched moments ago as Ning. We’re profiling now.

Company: iKarma
Launched: August 6, 2005
Location: Jupiter, Florida

iKarma is an online feedback and reputation system that we’ve been kicking the tires on for a few days.

While there are many closed, centralized feedback services that are quite useful (ebay’s feedback, for instance), they are a part of the service they support and cannot be leveraged effectively outside of those services.

I think they may be on to something really big here, but in my humble opinion they need to embrace the ideas of open services and open data. If they do that, I can see important third party applications being built on the back of iKarma. I expand on this below under “What it Needs”.

The Basics

You can register for iKarma directly at their site or via an email from someone who would like to write about you. Once you’ve registered you get an initial five-star review from the iKarma team and are encouraged to add contacts and begin writing about people. If they aren’t members, you can invite them.

A review consists of a star rating (0-5) and a free-text area. Your overall star rating is averaged among all reviews. If you don’t like a review, you can leave a comment with an explanation or choose to start a more formal challenge process.

You can only leave a review for any given member once; however, you can edit all aspects of a review if you change your mind later.

The basic service is free and iKarma plans to roll out paid premium services in the future.

To see our iKarma profile, click the icon below, or here.

What We Like

iKarma does one thing, reputation, very well. It has a clean and usable interface and no bugs were found. I also like that comments can be edited later on if the author changes her or his mind.

What it Needs

eBay has certainty that two parties have done business because they (eBay) close transactions and know who both parties are. A necessary limitation of the iKarma is that they have no idea if someone posting a review actually knows or has transacted with the person they are writing about. iKarma has mitigated this problem somewhat by creating a formal challenge process to any posted review.

I really like the point system in eBay. There is no upper limit on total feedback and I believe people use eBay sometimes simply because they want to increase their overall feedback number. In contrast, the only objective measure of your iKarma is an average star rating. After a certain critical mass is built up, another postive review or two will not noticeably affect your score. I think iKarma (for business reasons) should change their system to create a points system similar to eBay.

iKarma has an icon that you can include on a website or email (we’ve put one above). However, the icon would be more useful if it also told viewers your total iKarma score.

Lastly, and most importantly, there are many new web 2.0 and other online applications that could deeply embrace a third party reputation system like iKarma’s. But for that embrace to happen, they are going to have to open up their data and their APIs and let people create mashups.

I’m betting iKarma is hard at work building premium features to generate revenue. If I was running the company, I’d raise capital now (I don’t think they have), stop building premium features and focus entirely on opening up the APIs and data for third party applications. Good things will happen.

Team

Paul Williams, Chief Executive Officer
Scott Pitchford, President
Andrew Mayer, Chief Architect
Lori Leach, Creative Director
Robert Warren, Marketing and Communications
Tyler Pitchford, Special Projects
Robert Lieblein, Multimedia Coordinator

Chris Heur has organized a BrainJam meetup in San Francisco this Friday, October 7 from 1-5 pm. The nascent wiki is here.

Web 2.0 ends at 5 on Friday, so we’ll drop by for the “after party” that begins at 5:30.

The cost? $2.80. Since I spent $2k for Web 2.0, this dollar-cost-averages down my per-event cost for the week to about $1k. Nice.

Service: 1-800Free-411
Funding: $400k Series A - First Round Capital, Lead Dog Ventures
Location: San Francisco, CA

Directory assistance calls are expensive - $1 and higher - and yet 6 billion of them are made every year in the U.S. 1-800-free-411 is a new and brilliant service from Jingle Networks that provides this service to consumers for free.

1-800-FREE411 was created to provide callers with a free alternative to the skyrocketing rates being charged by phone companies for directory assistance (411).

The service is made possible by thousands of national and local businesses who sponsor this service with brief valuable audio advertisements that are played to callers who request businesses in their yellow pages category. This advertising model allows businesses to acquire new customers over the phone, cost effectively, with little or no risk. Meanwhile callers get free directory assistance, potentially saving each of them thousand of dollars per year.

The company was founded by veteran advertising and technology executives who pioneered some of the most innovative and successful advertising solutions in online media and now they are opening yet another channel for businesses to acquire new customers. This time, it’s over the phone.

The service works mostly like normal directory assistance. You dial their phone number and go through an automated system that asks for the location, type of listing and listing name. While you are waiting for the number, you must listen to a 12 second advertisement from a competitor to the service. If you choose to use the competitor instead, you simply dial “1″ to redirect your call.

Another difference is that if there is no local advertiser for the business type you have requested, the business receiving the call hears a short message at the beginning of the call telling them that the call is via Free-411. A tele-sales group follows up with the business to try to get them to advertise. Free-411 claims a 13% success rate in converting businesses to advertisers.

Free-411 gave a presentation at DEMO last week, which is available along with additional company information here.

As a user I love this, and I would highly consider advertising with them if I owned a small business.

Team

Scott Kliger - Founder and CEO
Tom Latinovich - Founder and SVP
Joshua Kopelman - Chairman
Susan S. Bratton - Advisor

Web 2.0 This Week
September 25 - October 1

The excitement is building over this week’s upcoming Web 2.0 Conference (October 5-7) in San Francisco. The event is sold out. It’s clear that a number of companies intend to launch this week, and so I expect we’ll be kept quite busy checking them all out.

1. Recent TechCrunch Profiles

PubSub LinkRank, Skype Video, zvents, Jotspot Live, Rollyo, FilmLoop, Slide, OPML Editor, Goowy (update), CustomScoop, Writeboard, Zoho Writer

2. Web 2.0, The Definition, Continued…

Richard MacManus summarizes this week’s evolution on the web 2.0 definitional thinking, inlcuding Tim O’Reilly’s important essay on the subject.

I also agree with Dave Winer - John Furrier may have said it perfectly in his comment to Om Malik:

Come on this is so simple.. Web 2.0 is the next version of the Web 1.0 (second generation) - it’s simply a better version than the previous version.

3. Yahoo Blog Search This Week

Stephen Baker says Yahoo will launch blog search this week.

4. New Blogging Study by Forrester Research

Information Week highlights new data released by Forrester Research last week. Ten percent of consumers now read blogs at least once per week:

Participation in three of the technologies highest on the Internet’s buzz list — blogging, reading RSS feeds, and engaging in social networking — is climbing, a research firm said Wednesday, but two of the three haven’t cracked the 1-in-10 barrier.

Ten percent of consumers read blogs once a week or more, said Forrester Research at the opening of its annual Consumer Forum. That’s double the 5 percent who browsed blogs in 2004.

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) use tripled in the same period, from 2 percent in 2004 to 6 percent this year, while use of social network sites such as Friendster.com and MySpace.com increased from 4 percent last year to 6 percent in 2005.

Via Fred Oliveira on webreakstuff.

5. Mashup Matrix

John Musser creates a great visual matrix of current mashups on Programmable Web. Let’s see how long he can keep it updated before it is simply too complicated to be usable. Great stuff.

6. Attention Trust Recorder Coming on Tuesday

Dan Farber says Attention Trust (profile) is launching a Recorder this week.

On Tuesday the organization will launch the AttentionTrust Recorder, a royalty-free, open sourced downloadable piece of code that keeps track of an individual’s behavior online. You can get the details in a podcast that features AttentionTrust Chairman Seth Goldstein and fellow ZDNet blogger and President of the organization, Steve Gillmor.

We’re big supporters of AttentionTrust and it’s ideals.

7. Google and NASA Party Together

Google is partnering with NASA on all kinds of stuff:

NASA and Google have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that
outlines plans for cooperation on a variety of areas, including
large-scale data management, massively distributed computing,
bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial
space industry. The MOU also highlights plans for Google to develop up
to one million square feet within the NASA Research Park at Moffett
Field.

The best commentary I’ve seen so far is from Greg Yardley, who writes:

Me either.

8. Meetro Gets some Wired Love

Wired writes about Meetro, the cool new location-aware instant messaging service. We profiled Meetro here. Digg the story here.

9. Writing about me-too’s

I wrote about Zoho Writer earlier this evening. It’s very much like Writely, and Zoho has another product out that is very much like 37Signal’s Backpack.

An interesting discussion sprang up almost immediately in the comments section, led by Jason Fried at 37Signals and Sam Schillace at Writely. Both comment that TechCrunch loses credibility by writing about companies that largely copy existing applications.

Jason writes:

I’d think twice about covering such blatant rips like this — it hurts your credibility to support these sorts of businesses and ventures.

Sam writes:

I love this blog, but it would be nice to get a little deeper review of competitors than this. I think a more accurate characterization of zoho writer right now would be a ’skin’ that looks like Writely, and is strictly following along right now.

These are two individuals that I respect greatly for their contributions to the web and so I do not take their comments lightly. I’m still thinking through what our policies should be in this area…and I appreciate any feedback.

10. Wedding Proposal via Search Engine

In an incredibly romantic moment, Barry asks Yisha to marry him via Ask Jeeves. This may be only slightly better than doing it at a baseball game, but she said yes, so…Congratulations!!!

Service: Zoho Writer
Parent Company: AdventNet
Launched: September 15, 2005
Location: Pleasanton, CA & India

We’ve been looking at a lot of Ajax Office applications (see Peter Rip and Richard MacManus on this as well) and other collaboration tools lately.

Quite frankly, it’s many people’s opinion (ours included) that Writely, Jotspot Live, Writeboard, Chalk and others are ultimately addressing the same customer pool - those who want to create, share, and group-edit documents online.

Zoho Writer is the newest entrant and is as good as the rest. Think Word + Group Editing + Ajax. It’s a rich ajax application that allows sharing and group editing, and, like Writely, has a great wysiwyg editing interface and excellent image import and manipulation features.

In fact, it’s pretty much exactly like Writely, except they do not yet support Word format import/export or tagging (coming soon).

Check out Zoho’s BackPack-like product Zoho Planner too.

Can’t wait to see Google’s (rumored) full Ajax suite that is (rumored to be) coming out this year.