Tomorrow, ThinkFree will announce a new way to publish documents: ThinkFree Docs. The feature looks a lot like Scribd: It's a publicly accessible, YouTube-like document directory. And like YouTube, documents stored on it can be embedded in blogs and Web sites.
ThinkFree creates simple, dedicated pages for hosting office documents.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Docs rounds out the publishing options for the online suite ThinkFree, which already had a method for sharing documents that's much like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and other online productivity suites: from within the suite, you can e-mail an invitation to other people so they can view or edit your documents on the ThinkFree site. That's what you want for collaboration. But when you want to publish a document to the world at large, you might want the much simpler ThinkFree Docs instead--it will spare viewers unfamiliar with ThinkFree the confusion of using a new service.
You can use Docs independently of the ThinkFree suite. The service does a decent job of displaying standard Microsoft Office (2003 format) files, as well as other formats like PDF and RTF.
As on media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, shared files all get their own comment threads. Docs' commenting system is rudimentary, though, and the comments are not visible or accessible when a document is embedded on another site. For that matter, very little else is available from an embedded document. There's no way to download a file, nor is there a link to the file's dedicated URL, where the download link, embed codes, and comment board reside. Scribd, by contrast, offers links back to the sharing page on the Scribd site, as well as download and other useful links.
ThinkFree Docs is a useful feature for ThinkFree suite users who want to publish their documents to the Web, but as a standalone document sharing site it comes up a bit short.
Below: An embedded ThinkFree Docs viewer.
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If you're anything like me, you've got a ton of documents that have piled up over the years. People my age (recent college grads) are some of the worst, with nearly a decade of research papers, projects, and various snippets saved along the way--many of which took hours of hard work and are now relegated to a hard archive somewhere in your documents folder or on burnt optical media. Luckily for your files, there are a few places to share them with others who might be interested in reading.
Scribd is one of the most popular solutions, and my personal favorite of the bunch. It calls itself the "YouTube for documents," which is a fairly apt description. Scribd users can share popular document formats like Word, PDF, plain text, PowerPoint, and Excel. Each uploaded document can be made private or public, and is completely searchable. Users can also embed a document on Scribd on any Web site or blog. Users who like what they see can save the file as a PDF, Word file, text, or MP3 (spoken by an electronic voice).
What's really neat about Scribd is the built-in statistics tracking. This lets you keep track of when and where people have looked at your work, with some neat charts and a viewing log.
YouScript has been around for a couple of months now. YouScript gives your documents (mainly movie or TV scripts) a social networking spin, with the option to create writing groups to share your files with others online. Each group can schedule meetings, hand out assignments or homework, and discuss work in the integrated forums and comments. Unlike Scribd, however there's no built-in reader, and documents are managed in a PDF viewer.
OpenFloodgate is a document sharing service created by a Tina Seelig, executive director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. We heard about OpenFloodgate this morning and were pitched with the idea that it could be used to share documents for small companies using its document privacy features. Any uploaded document is displayed in an HTML viewer that converts each page into its own image. What's neat is OpenFloodgate's text size selector. This lets you pick from three sizes, including extralarge, which is about the size of a children's book. Also cool are user comments, which shows up as an overlay box on top of the document, not as a separate section.
I'd expect to see more of these sites popping up in the future, although with Google Docs, Thinkfree, and Zoho at work on online replacements for our office apps, we're likely to see file migration moving further and further away from the hard drive.
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