Buzzword Open Up

Posted on November 9, 2007
Filed Under web 2.0 |

Adobe opened up their Buzzword online document editor to the public and it’s well worth taking the app for a spin. If I were to use just one word to sum up my thoughts it would be “beautiful”. In terms of user presentation, Adobe again breaks away from the pack and delivers something that is really different and pleasing from a user experience perspective.

First a little background, Adobe acquired this product last month when they acquired Virtual Ubiquity, a company building apps using their developer tools. In that light it is probably unfair of me to criticize Adobe for the limited feature set, however I would have expected that Adobe would flesh out the app a little more with their considerable resources before opening up this app to a public preview release.

I am still a dedicated Word user even though Microsoft hasn’t updated that app in ages and it takes forever to load. Despite that I still open it out of habit and am comfortable with the features. Having said that, I occasionally throw open an online editor to take notes or when I explicitly want to share a document with other people.

In the online document editor space ZohoWriter is still the king with the most comprehensive feature set and very reliable day-to-day use, Google Docs can only be described as adequate, and there are a handful of others that quite frankly I have not been motivated to use.

Buzzword is not without limitations and some of them are annoying. If you try loading Buzzword in Safari v3.0.4 you will get an error message indicating that Safari is only supported in v2.0.4 and v3.0.3… c’mon Adobe, that’s rookie stuff. The image features would not work for me and that’s one of the more differentiating features that I was looking to take advantage of.

Document management through the file manager in the service is rudimentary and I could not open documents from my desktop, so in the absence of reliable document import tools I would be reluctant to commit to this service. Also, Adobe could have scored a major coup by supporting docx file types, something that Mac Word users are increasingly bedeviled by when sharing documents with people using the latest version of Office on Windows.

It’s not like docx is a new format anymore and clearly it will become widely used, therefore it’s about time that companies offering these services and applications consider support for docx to be a requirement. Also, where’s “Save As PDF”, I would have never believed that Adobe would not support PDF in their own service!

As much as I wanted to love Buzzword, I can’t. It is a fantastic peek into Abode’s potential in online application services but the feature set is way too limited and the emphasis on design elegance over function wears thin quickly. Lastly, there is a comprehensive help section but absent of a search tool it really isn’t that useful and I found myself going to help a lot, which probably isn’t a good thing.

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