Documents on the Online Desktop

[Steven Garrity <stevelist silverorange com>]

A quick thought about the Online Desktop effort.

I've started using the spreadsheets and documents of Google Docs lately 
and it has really started to change the way I think about documents.

The elegant simplicity of the revision management and collaboration of 
editing a Google Document with a group makes forwarding around 
variations of a Word document (or even an ODF doc) seem ridiculous.

There are a few things I like about Google Documents that I think could 
be important for the free desktop.

1. Collaboration - the collaboration in Gobby and coming to AbiWord are 
nice (and real-time), but you still have to find each-other. A google 
doc just lives on the network. It doesn't have a "home" (beyond a 
primary account). Everyone invited has equally easy access to it.

2. Organization - rather than a fixed desktop metaphor with a set of 
folders (which I had been quite satisfied with until now), Google Docs 
organizes your documents more like email (or Gmail, I suppose) with the 
most recently edited/created docs at the top of the list. You can order 
by any other attribute as well. Documents that you're working on are 
always there at the top, and old stuff just falls away. I'd love it if 
the documents I work on on my own desktop worked this way as well. Right 
now, the six-month-old document on my desktop looks exactly the same as 
the one next to it that I created 10 minutes ago, yet they are not equal.

3. Accessibility - like my IMAP/web-based email, like my jabber 
accounts, like my whatever-space/book account, the docs I create, share, 
and edit with Google Documents are accessible from any computer with a 
web-browser. Given the level of connectivity we enjoy these days, it's 
surprising that this level of universal access to all of the information 
on our PCs isn't considered a basic necessity.

Of course, there are drawbacks. Google Docs is great for editing 
documents with limited formatting (though I wouldn't hesitate to write a 
book using it, and format later - especially given the export options to 
ODF). WYSIWYG editing can still be pretty annoying on the web and still 
isn't as solid as most desktop apps.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, it's not running on free software. 
Well, it's running on a lot of free software (*nix, apache, etc.), but 
the document sharing software itself is not free. This leads towards the 
discussion of what "free-as-in-speech services" are, and I'm really not 
sure.

One one hand, Google has a good API, good import/export (including 
free/open formats like ODF), so I can get my data in and out without too 
much fear of lock-in.

On the other hand, I don't have control over a key layer and important 
aspects of the interface. If Google Docs isn't available in my language, 
there's nothing I can do. If Google Docs shared my docs with my 
oppressive government (I'm not suggesting they do, just a hypothetical), 
there's nothing I can do.

Building free-software alternatives to Google Docs seems like a huge 
undertaking (to do as well as they have done), but I would have said the 
same thing about a desktop operating system 15 years ago.

Anyhow, I don't have any grand conclusions. Rather, I just wanted to 
share some of the impact the use of Google Documents has had on how I 
think about documents and the network.

If I was to take anything from this, it would be that I don't want the 
wall to exist between my "desktop documents" that I have created and 
edited on my own PC (with OpenOffice, Inkscape, etc.) to be completely 
segregated from any docs I create with an online service. I'm not sure 
how, but it seems that a document I create on my desktop should show up 
in my google docs and vice-versa.

Cheers,
Steven Garrity