We mentioned WriteWith in a roundup post last month on new Y Combinator startups. They’ve created a group writing platform that falls somewhere between a blogging platform, a wiki, and an online Word clone. The best part of it is that it works with the existing Wordpress and Typepad blogging software.

Current blogging software is rather kludgy when it comes to working with other writers on posts. To collaborate on a document in Wordpress, you have to share a draft link with a friend and also create an account for that person. And even then, you only have one version of the document, causing old versions to be lost by new revisions. WriteWith may eventually change that for blogs and any other online publishing platform.

Background

Two of the founders originally got the idea for the system when writing at their college newspapers, the Stanford Daily and Binghamton’s Pipedream. They wanted to find a better way to move articles from thought to the printed word, while handling revisions made by as many as 6 people along the way. Their first product was a newsroom, complete with administrative features for managing an articles lifecycle. That product has been used by 15 college newspapers across the US and Canada, including Stanford and the University of Alberta, which runs a national newswire. Licenses for other enterprise content management applications for newspapers, like Managing Editor, can cost upwards of $100,000.

The WriteWith team then stepped back, re-evaluated the publishing business and started designing for pixels over print. The new version is more flexible than their newsroom product and tailored specifically for managing collaboratively edited text online. And when I say text, it really is just for text. WriteWith’s text editor is taken straight out of the Dojo ajax library and doesn’t display complex WYSIWYG layout information. However, WriteWith’s focus is on editing, not the editor.

Collaboration

Making a document begins by starting right in the editor, or uploading a document to the site (.doc, .txt, .rtf, Open Office). Once a document is started, you can invite other people to see and edit it by email without their needing to create an account. When you go to a document page you’ll see the latest version, a list of previous versions, a message board, and task assignments. Everyone invited to edit and view a document has the equal ability to edit a document, assign tasks to each other, and post messages to the board.

WriteWith handles the potential chaos through communication and simple version control, which adds a new version of the document to the history each time a user makes an edit. The individual versions can then be compared, with the differences between each version highlighted. The live message board and tasks help to guide these revisions. Any user can assign another user a task by typing it into a task message box or post a note to the message board. When it’s agreed that the document is completed, it can then be published to a blog (Wordpress, Typepad) or downloaded (.doc, .txt, .rtf, Open Office).

There’s a growing need for collaborative editing platforms as blogging becomes a more established business and the ranks of their writers grow. WriteWith may be the solution that fills that need.

After Condé Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Y Combinator funded Reddit, people took notice. This wasn’t just some quirky incubator where they gave college students a few bucks to kick start their new companies (although it is that, too – their standard deal is $5000 + $5000 per founder, for 6%ish of the company) – real products were coming out of Y Combinator, and people started to notice.

Y Combinator funds startups twice per year, in batches. Funded startups that have previously launched include Reddit, Kiko, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, PollGround, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Buxfer, and Octopart. Today, Y Combinator invited in TechCrunch and a select group of investors and industry experts to view the current crop of companies, just getting ready to launch. Michael Arrington and I attended the sessions, and our notes on the new companies are below.

Here’s a rundown of who presented, minus a few who are still in stealth mode:

Zenter
Zenter is an web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show.

Weebly
Weebly is an AJAX website creator that recently joined Y Combinator. Weebly’s drag-n-drop interface lets you quickly put together a personal website any way you like. For the demonstration they recreated the Benchmark Capital website. They recently had a great upgrade to their site which included some slick new themes and layouts possibilities. Our previous coverage of Weebly is here and here.

Virtualmin
Virtualmin is taking on the lack of innovation in the server admin programs, like Plesk, by making a more accessable version for pages managed by the non-technical crowd. The program will feature simple installs of popular programs like content management systems that often cost extra on other providers. It will also let you administer your website from your desktop and mobile device.

Octopart
Vertical search engine Octopart, which launched not too long ago, focuses on putting an end the inadequate search engines used by electronics parts manufacturers. Octopart lets you search, compare prices, and view specifications for parts on Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, Mouser, and Newark InOne. They have a deal with how-to hobbyist’s site, Instructables, to make buying parts for your project a snap. They’ve also got more parts supplies calling to get their data up on the site.

Tsumobi
Mobile applications have so far been nightmares to implement. It’s often hard to gain adoption due to complicated installs and near impossible to get users to upgrade their version once the product has shipped. Tsumobi hopes to solve this problem by creating their own language. The new language will sit on top of J2ME and process applications downloaded (via URL) for Tsumobi enabled sites. This means that developers will be able to change Tsumobi applications on the fly and have Tsumobi enabled phones automatically get the updates just by visiting a link.

Whitenoise Networks
Whitenoise is like a social network for the music industry. It comes with specially made tools for bands, agents, publicists, and venues to manage each part of their business. Bands will be able to manage their cross country tours by map, using a venue search to find gigs in any town they’re passing through. Venues will get access to a full list of artists in their area along with samples and ways to reach their agent to book a show.

Buxfer
Buxfer is Quicken for 20 somethings. As we covered before, it solves a problem similar to Billmonk, but with more advanced features. Buxfer tackles the unique needs of young people trying to find out where all their money evaporates to and reign in their expenses. To date, they’ve been tracking $8.4 million in over 30,000 transactions.

Writewith.com
Writewith is a collaborative writing web app, enabling you to easily flow through the steps of writing, editing, and publishing a document with a group. A document is started by uploading an existing document (.doc, .txt, .rdf) or just typing away. After the initial draft is completed, you can invite other editors by email and assign them tasks. Writewith has full version control and even lets you post comments to each other, making it possible to edit together in real time. Currently Writewith is in beta testing with 15 college newspapers including Stanford and two of Canada’s largest college papers (which even includes a national newswire).

Socialmoth
Socialmoth is a community to post your thoughts anonymously. You can view postings (mostly gossip and secrets) from the whole community as well as get updates for when someone in your group of friends makes a post. The vast majority of their members appear to be women, with over 600 posts being made per day. These guys will also be taking a new spin on their idea, launching Disenchat.com, a place to post anonymously about your workplace. The system will verify your organization by email address (like Facebook) and let you start riffing. Outsiders will be able to see the existence of the forum and volume of posting, but not the specific comments.

View3
View3 plans on changing the way 3D models are made. Like Photosynth, View3 will let you walk into and explore 3D images of photos, but will let you use as little as one photo to get started. The project has been started by a group of 3 Stanford grad students and currently holds 2 patents in the area.

Auctomatic
eBay power users make an average of 400 listings per day. With 5 pages to fill to make a listing, that’s 2000 page views and a lot of clicking. Auctomatic plans to make this a whole lot simpler first by cutting it down to a single page and then adding more management features on top. eBay sales management is a category currently dominated by Vendio and Marketworks, who together contribute about $1.8 billion dollars of goods to the auction giant. For their service, these providers often take a percentage of sales, as well as a monthly fee that can be as high as $400. Auctomatic plans to have more a more flexible program and pricing. They have already raised $400K in angel financing apart from Y Combinator.

Snipshot
Snipshot is a photo editor that lets you start editing any photo with one click of a bookmarklet. You can use Snipshot to crop, resize, adjust colors, an automatically enhance you photos within your browser and then save it back to the web. There are a couple other photo editors in this category and Photoshop plans to get in as well.