One truism of web companies is that you need early adopters — typically within the tech community — before you can break into the mainstream. Why? Tech folks are more attuned to new tech than most people, and they’ll tell everyone else about the stuff that’s good. This is the story of Yahoo, Google and countless others.
However, we’ve been thinking that only a fraction of our target users (people who write together a lot) are in this early-adopter category, so we’ve been looking to break the web mold and form a core among regular folks. Still, we’re seeing good things with the techies.
For example, last week we had a couple of tech bloggers write about us because they use us:
- TechTear, a Spanish-language tech blog based in Madrid, interviewed me about our past, present and future. The interviewer, David Alayón, thought we were a useful application (he’s a tech guy who writes for more than one blog — so a nice affirmation of our blog functionality).
- Onlamp, an O’Reilly blog that covers open source web platforms, wrote about how a group of developers in San Francisco and Sao Paulo use us to keep track of documents. The writer pointed out some of what makes writewith unique: “for each document you can establish a workflow, there is an easy-to-use history and notes section and there is a nice desktop-like interface for editing the current revision.”
The latter post also mentioned how the group uses writewith together with a wiki to manage the group’s documents. Note: we have some interesting things in the works along those lines. Watch this blog for more news, and don’t forget to email us with your thoughts: honchos@writewith.com
1 Comment
May 27, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Another application for this software is for writing full-length books. I suggest setting up a Writewith account dedicated to a single book project. Documents within the account will be separate chapters of the book. Authors will appreciate seeing all chapters listed at a glance and available at a click. And the versioning aspects of the program are extremely attractive to book authors.
The document history is helpful too, especially the capability of adding notes to oneself. And I really like the task assignment tool, with its email reminder capability.
As you develop the software, you may wish to add some options regarding document sorting. An alpha-numeric sort would be helpful, as writers can prefix the document name with chapter number, forcing the documents into book sequence.
I’ve just added a post about this strategy, along with a few additional suggestions, at my blog at http://www.becoming-a-writer-seriously.com. I hope other writers will add their own suggestions.
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