Today’s note in Techcunch about Writely finally being open triggered mixed feelings. I was happy, of course, to finally be happy to test drive the new Google candy.  I was also disappointed by not having heard from Writely directly after submitting my name twice in the past.  Anyway, I got over it, and went directly to checking it out.

Writely put together a word processor with great web-soul. They are the winner of their space in that department, meaning that they didn’t just mimic MS Word. Support for Publishing, Collaboration and Blogging is integrated into the user experience (although with somewhat unclear redundancy) - key features that differentiate web based word processing from desktop based. Tagging is also well integrated. Built in support for PDF and OpenOffice made me feel like I could finally do without Microsoft. So did the excellent experience using FireFox. The Layout is neat but I would personally go for a difference choice of colors. What really impressed me was the clean support for right to left languages. Better then Gmail!

On the flip side, it did seem the applications could use some more maturity. Zoho Writer, for example, is more impressive when it comes to complicated and heavy documents. Writely limits uploads to 500k (why?) and that, too, doesn’t seem to work that well. I also crashed a couple of times when trying to use it and we know absolute availability is a key hurdle when it comes to porting desktop experiences to the web.

Still, this market is becoming interesting. Unlike spreadsheets, I don’t think this is an easy Google cleanup. Zoho, which mimics MS Word, certainly creates a worth y alternative. For those of you interesting in full benchmarking of all players, CNET offers a thorough list. Interesting times.