Online office suite ThinkFree joins the community sharing crowd Tuesday, with the launch of a number of new features.
The new (beta) version of ThinkFree Docs will allow users to search, share, tag and publish Microsoft Office and ThinkFree documents in an online social community, much in the same way that Flickr allows photographers to publish and share photos.
I’m told the thinking from the ThinkFree team was to get these features out to users now, with aesthetics to follow. And yet from what I’ve seen of the new service, I can’t fault the look. The new community tools build on an already pleasant interface, having nearly a YouTube feel to them (minus the videos).
The addition of tagging is immediately evident. Documents viewable by the community now come complete with ratings, embedding code, comment fields, downloading options and the obligatory post this to Digg/ Furl/ del.icio.us buttons. In many ways it’s moving into the territory previously claimed by Scribd, the new features at ThinkFree share a lot of similarity with Scribd, and yet they are not exclusive unto themselves, building upon an already very smart online Microsoft Office alternative.
Thinkfree currently has 275,000 users. Previous TechCrunch coverage here and here.
Interesting, but I guess I didn’t see Scribd’s point that much either. It seems like one more layer away from what I use the web for.
Collaborative documenting serves one of the niche purposes that it is pretty difficult to get your head around. That is why I can’t really envision a future where Google Docs (Writely *ahem*) ever gains the popularity of something like Word.
Documents that people want to share very rarely have the enterprise applications that are required by a serious office suite. Maybe these community additions are a push in the write direction, giving people with less important wordsmithing a reason to write on ThinkFree.
Ever had the feeling of “Wow, this is a cool feature”, but what to use it for? That’s my feeling in this case.
Contrary to #2 Steve, I think document sharing is very useful - but it typically occurs in well-defined groups (business, co-authors ..etc), not with the general public, a’la Flickr.
Now, before someone else points out, I am an Advisor to ThinkFree competitor Zoho - but that should not prevent me from .. Thinking… Free
A better version of Scribd that rids us of Acrobat — Great!
http://www.ebizmba.com
To me the killer app is being able to view the 300 millions documents that are already online.
Folks: there are 246 millions PDFs, 32 millions DOCs, 11 million PPT and 10 millions PS files online (as approximated using Google search for different filetypes).
The pain for me is to open Acrobat or Office to view these documents while I’m surfing.
This is why I did http://www.docufarm.com
Docufarm is an online document viewer that opens documents inside your browser, keeping the original layout of the document (unlike ThinkFree and GDocs which break the layout in their HTML-based rendering).
Plus, Docufarm highlights the keywords you’re looking for, like Google’s cache/view as HTML.
And of course, no more viruses because all you get is just HTML.
So don’t fear these 10Mb PDF files anymore: click, read, and learn.
I hope Docufarm is useful for you too.
Zoli, nice to see your comments and glad you are ThinkFree’ing;).
I would have to say that I totally agree with you. I think that there will be a lot of people that find a use for ThinkFree Docs as is, but I think where it will get really interesting is where two trends are going to emerge: 1) the trend toward social networking around very standard and portable formats (i.e. office documents), and 2) Enterprise organizations looking to harness the power of the wisdom of the masses.
One way or another we will build our way toward well defined communities sharing information in a public space. I will be the first to admit we have some work to do, but we wanted to put it out there so that our users could tell us how they want us to get there.
Thanks,
Jonathan
Without this feature do you think any new firm can exist. Its just like oxygen for any new companies.
This kind of cool, but sharing pictures, movies, etc appeals more to me than sharing word files or spreadsheets.
Well, I did make a household budget spreadsheet that was useful, I suppose someone might find value in that.
It might be nice for my kids little coach to post schedules, etc up there.
This does seem the next logical step as people divorce themselves from being so married to having files on their desktop.
This sharing of information is exactly what I thought that the web was intended for.
To poster #5, first of all pimping yourself like that is not cool (although you did make me look, so you acheived your goal), after a quick view of your site, it seems completely worthless.
to #8: Have you tried clicking on the thumbnails to see the full resolution page and actually read something? I’m sorry if you didn’t find it useful, and I’ll try not to pimp myself next time.
Laurent,
Like I said “after a quick view of your site”…and by ‘quick view’ I mean that I looked at the first page and was thoroughly unimpressed.
The first page is search box and some radio buttons.
How about having some sort of text, instructions, something/ANYTHING instead of such a blank page?
So then I went to look at some PowerPoints, and when I clicked to load them (I tried 3 PPTs) they would go to 100% of the size, but then it says it red “sorry, error converting file”.
The first PDF I tried worked fine, but it did take about 20 seconds to load (it was a large file, so that was not great but acceptable). That seems like a rather neat tool.