Pretty Web journal tool Penzu goes pro

Penzu, the stylish Web word processor we checked out about a year ago, is ready to make a business out of its hosted writing tools.

The company on Wednesday introduced a professional version of its service that costs $19 a year and fixes many of the gripes we originally had about its very pretty, but feature-light, offerings.

A pro membership now gets you all kinds of goodies, including a rich text editor, tags for organization, image hosting, 256-bit AES encryption on posts that you've locked, and themes that skin the entire interface to your liking. Pro users can also slurp in their posts from another blog service (currently Live Journal only), as well as export them as PDFs and raw text files.

Penzu can now be skinned in one of six themes for those who pay for the service's new pro membership.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

New features are not limited to pro users. All users now have a way to share a read-only version of a post to others that does not require any special sign-up for the person who's viewing it. The tool can also now grab your photos from Flickr, not just your desktop.

This feature worked without issue when we tried it, albeit slowly. You first have to dig through all your Flickr albums, then cycle eight photos at a time to find the shots for which you're looking. After that, you have to wait while they're imported, which, in our case, took close to 2 minutes per photo, making the tool take too long to be usable.

It's worth noting that the service is still designed as a diary replacement, not as a collaborative document editor, the way Google Docs, Zoho Writer, Adobe's Acrobat.com, and others operate.

Penzu's focus makes it difficult to make strong comparisons to those tools, but to be honest, I don't see much value in paying the $19 for some of the extra features it adds. Things like rich text editing, data exporting, and tagging should be standard features on just about any Web-based writing tool, if it hopes to compete for user attention and, in this case, dollars.

[alexandermimran]

Thanks for the post, Josh.

Just wanted to respond to the last paragraph and say that Penzu already offers features our competition doesn't:

? Pro users can change the date of their entry to any date in the past (something not available on Google Docs).
? Pro users can lock individual entries with encryption, something that no other service offers (if you keep a diary or personal journal, privacy is paramount).
? Pro users can also customize the pad style and backgrounds of each individual entry, something not offered on similar services either.

We are working on the Flickr importing to make it faster and less time consuming at the moment. And if you have a problem with anything at all, you can email us directly and actually get a response. Can you directly email Google and easily get support? Don't think so...

With all of that said, we have so many features we want to add and are constantly working to make our service better. This was our feature-set for launch and we will be offering lots more new and exciting functionality down the road.

Cheers,

- Alexander