Writely is definitely on to something. I’d tried web word processors and generally been underwhelmed. But Writely has gotten two things right that it’s predecessors generally haven’t.

The first key feature is an aggressive autosave feature that gives you utter confidence that you won’t lose your work due to a browser crash or navigation. An online indicator assures you of the last time the document was autosaved. Built in versioning allows you to roll back to any previous version of the document or compare versions to see what changed.

The second killer feature is collaboration. Writely allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time and merges their changes in real time. It lets each collaborator know about the other authors currently working with the document. (Some sort of lightweight buddy IM system would also be very interesting, so that you see which other collaborators were online and chat with them. Meebo meets Writely, anyone?) I need to get some more experience in the how the auto merging works out in practice (will we get merge conflicts?), but the value proposition is compelling.

The other built in advantage, of course, is roaming; I can access my document from any PC. As the number of PCs proliferate, this becomes increasingly important.

Also nice is principle is the feature that allows you to save your document as a Word or OpenOffice document. The only problem with this feature is that it inserted a number of extra blank lines in the document, which seems to be the bane of HTML editors everywhere. Hopefully they can fix this bug.

The enterprise wiki system Confluence 2.0 is now available. Some key new features include rich text editing and tagging.

Jobster has been a heavy user of Confluence; we have thousands of pages in confluence capturing everything from specifications to ski trip plans. Having this knowledge captured in one searchable place has been invaluable for bringing new employees up to speed and sharing knowledge through the company.

To this point, most of the pages have written by the more technical people in the companyl; I’m hoping that the WYSIWYG editing will make everyone in the company a content author.

There is a fair amount of interest in mobile search but a scarcity of publicly available data on mobile search usage. Mobile Zeitgeist provides statistics on mobile search behavior based on the 150,000 or so searches made using Berry411 each month.

IWITTS has a good set of employer tips for recruiting women.

Some of the topics covered in the article are:

• using the web to target and recruit women applicants,
• running successful career expos,
• taking advantage of free media coverage,
• assembling target lists, and
• partnering with educational institutions.

Read More

The Ruby on Spring project page now includes a general download link for those wishing to try the package.

Ruby on Spring is an open source project that integrates the JRuby dynamic language with the Spring application framework to facilitate rapid development. It allows controllers to be written in Ruby while taking full advantage of the Spring environment. Ruby on Spring has been packaged as a JAR and verified to work with a stock installation of Tomcat, Spring, and Hibernate.

We’re still early in the development cycle, so your feedback and improvements are appreciated.

Learn More

Monday night we launched a new version of Jobster. In addition the recruiter facing features you can’t see, there are a number of new professional features, especially in Jobster Labs. (Jobster Labs lets us experiment and iterate rapidly on new ideas that aren’t quite ready for prime time.)

Jason summarizes the key new features:

[We launched] some cool new features to the www.jobster.com job search site, including:

Check out Jobster Live…this is just pure eye-candy.  view real-time job searches on a map as they are being searched by users around the country.

The number of jobs indexed by jobster was also increased by 2 to 4 fold in most regions.  To get your jobs added, register here.

We also formally launched jobster groups.  create a jobster group for your affinity group (e.g. stanford mba’s) and share jobs and referral opportunities.

We also added some new jobster labs features. (dev stuff which requires registration).

• publish a feed of jobs at companies you are connected to; customize your feed’s look and feel
• build an email signature with a live feed of jobs at your company or companies you are closely connected to
• Invite your friends and colleagues to jobster and share referral opportunities (increases jobseeker ability to gain referrals).
• create a wishlists of companies that you would like to work for

Joe writes about the job feed tool we’ve created in Jobster Labs.

If you have a web page or a blog, you can create a feed of jobs that your readers are likely to be interested in, and even help them get noticed for the position if you know them. You can also track the number of clicks and prospects resulting from your feed.

Create a job feed
(free registration required.)

You can also include a job feed in your email signature– if your company uses Jobster, this is a great well to help promote openings in your team or company every time you send an email.

If you’re interested in joining the Jobster affiliate network of blogs, please contact me for more information.

Inspired by Livemarks, Ryan Kukendall put together a real time display of job searches on Jobster. Check it out; it’s a good example of AJAX and what can be accomplished in an innovation project.

A feature I especially like is the tag cloud that coalesces beneath the map as searches come in.

Via John, I spotted Wikicalc, from Dan Bricklin, one of the original creators of Visicalc.

The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet.

wikiCalc is a standalone browser application (packaged as a Win32 executable that runs a local web server), rather than a component of a larger authoring experience.

What’s I’d really to see would like to see would be lightweight table editing and manipulation built into the wiki management software itself, taking advantage of AJAX to provide a fast experience for interacting with semi-structured data.

Imagine if you could create and update and sort and filter your email address book or your Googlebase data as easily as you do an Excel spreadsheet, for example.

Done right, this could equal the scope of Visicalc’s impact in the changing the way people interact with semistructured data on the web.

At Jobster, we use Confluence maintain everything from feature lists to our ping pong ladder, and we experience pain editing and interacting with tables..

I wrote an Excel Macro called Excel To Confluence to automatically create the wiki markup from an excel spreadsheet, but having to work with data in a separate and slow to launch program is a pain.

I know that Microsoft has been working to web enable past versions of Office, but their focus is the intranet and Windows rather than an internet component. Think AJAX versus DHTML, GMail versus Outlook web access.

As Sergei Brin said,

I don’t really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly, and say can we do the minicomputer on the Web on AJAX makes sense. I’m not saying that’s what [Microsoft] Office is, I’m just saying that I think the Web and Web 2.0, if that’s what you want to call it, gives you the opportunity to do new and better things than the Office package and more.

By popular request, I’ve added a “sports” plugin to the Berry411 mobile search tool. The plugin helps you quickly find professional and college sports scores using 4info.

You can search on city, team, or college name. (e.g “sports: seahawks”, “sports: uw”, “sports: seattle”). The latter will display all of the different teams for the city you specify. Once your favorite teams are in your search history, you can quickly find the latest scores via autocomplete.

You can add the sports plugin via the “Edit Plugins” menu item; it’s also built into the latest point release of Berry411 (version 2.63.)

base.google.com is now really live with a beta label.

General?  Roger that!  Usable for non geeks?  Hmm…

I’ll report back with a less superficial impression in a few days.