Since we launched, we’ve seen people using writewith in ways we hadn’t assumed. Here are some samples of what we’ve been hearing from people:
- A classroom peer-reviewing students’ assignments
- Conference organizers planning out a schedule of events together
- A group of friends brainstorming ideas for a club that they’re forming
- A live web broadcaster collaboratively taking notes with his audience
- And of course, members of a group blog working on drafts of their posts
When we switched from defining our product as an “online newsroom” that only a few select people could get access to, we were starting an experiment… are the tools that are useful for writers and editors also useful for all sorts of other writing? Would we be able to use the web to find this out, via people blogging about us and recommending us to each other? The answers: yes and yes.
Making writewith publicly available has given us a better understanding of what we’re doing wrong and what we’re doing right. This mass of input from various sources helps to shape our decisions about which features to work on — this is how we avoid building a product full of features that nobody uses!
All part of our plan for making writing together work better.
Please shoot us an email if you have more ideas for improvements: honchos@writewith.com
5 Comments
May 6, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Keep up the great work!
May 8, 2007 at 4:59 am
Yes, keep up the great work! I love writewith. I have one minor request, I shot you an email but I never got a reply. It would be nice if writewith remembered me so that I didn’t have to login every time. Is this possible?
May 8, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Thanks, people. Pioneer1… yikes, we missed that email. Sorry! Auto-login is something that we’re working on. We’ll keep you posted.
-Eric
June 7, 2007 at 8:54 pm
I write collaboratively with many varied folks. I’m working with a 77 year old woman now on a piece for our Quaker community. She is tech-phobic, but is managing quite well with your site.
2 questions. Is this always going to be free to users? Also what are your privacy policies. Wouldn’t want just anyone mucking around in Quaker papers you know…
June 8, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Thanks for the note, borges.
You can take a look at our privacy policy here: http://writewith.com/legal/privacy
(Within our Terms of Service)
The basic service will always be free. However, we’ll be rolling out premium features for heavy individual users and for organizations — these will cost money, but will be worth it for a lot of people.
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