Central Desktop announced today a new collaborative framework that allows people to open, save, edit and co-author files stored in the cloud directly from Microsoft Office.

Adding to the services are new features that allow multiple people to co-edit and co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Central Desktop maintains that the added features eliminate the need to upgrade to Microsoft Sharepoint or Microsoft Office 2010. The new features will be available in June.

Sponsor

We see Central Desktop as part of a new wave. Co-editing is the next step to real-time collaboration, fitting with activity streams, co-commenting and such services as the ability to create individual rich profiles.

Co-editing served as a hallmark feature of Google
Wave upon its introduction. Novell Pulse offers integration with Google Wave to offer the co-editing capabilities.

Cubetree may best express the value of enriched co-editing. Yesterday, SuccessFactors bought the startup for a deal valued at $50 million.

Discuss

Last week Google changed the Local Business Center to Google Places, and along with that change came some new features for local businesses. We looked at those here.

Among those changes was the addition of Google’s tag advertising. For $25 a month, businesses (in certain cities) can use Tags to highlight their listings on Google.com and Google Maps. These are yellow markers that let you promote important aspects of your business. They can be used for things like coupons, photos, and other select features.  They don’t affect the rank of search results, but they give customers more information and may prove beneficial.

Google promised that while the offering was starting out in a limited number of cities, that number would be expanding. The expansion process is underway. Google has now announced the addition of 11 new cities.

The new cities are: San Jose, Houston, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder, Chicago, San Francisco and Mountain View.

"You’ll notice that we’ve added Mountain View, CA to the list of cities participating in the trial," says Product Manager Shalini Agarwal. "Because we are still tweaking the product a bit, we thought we’d make it available in our hometown so we can get quick feedback as we work on new features."

Businesses in the available cities can sign up for Tags from their Google Places accounts.

In a couple weeks, Google says it will launch a new tag type: "post to your Place Page". This will be a freeform text field that will let business owners highlight custom messages announcing sales or events.

The company did not indicate when more cities will become available, but I would expect the feature to make regular expansions in the not-too-distant future.

Lunchwalla, the app that helps take the hassle out of deciding where and when to plan a group lunch, movie viewing or other get-together, has added some new features over the past week and weeks prior that should help cement its spot in the realm of collaborative decision-making.

The company announced this week that it was unveiling Foursquare integration and something we tend to favor in the LBS market – real-world incentives.

Sponsor

The service already brings together Yelp reviews with OpenTable reservations, menus and coupons, as we noted when we first reviewed it last March. Earlier this month it added movies and events, using Zvents and Tribune Media Services. Now this week, the company has pulled Foursquare into the mix.

Foursquare integrations means that Lunchwalla users will be able to connect their Lunchwalla accounts to their Foursquare accounts, pulling in their Foursquare checkins and importing friends. And after creating an event on Lunchwalla, users can then checkin to that event on Foursquare. That checkin will not only become part of the Lunchwalla page on that event but gives users additional “Lunchwalla Points”.

The Lunchwalla Points might be our favorite part. While we’re not exactly sure what to do with that “Beatnick” we found last month when checking in with Gowalla at a local coffee shop, Lunchwalla Points have that real-world incentive aspect to them that we just can’t argue with. Planning an event, inviting other Lunchwalla members, checking-in using foursquare and other actions all earn Lunchwalla Points. What happens with these points?

Every week, we will be calculating the number of points accumulated by Lunchwalla users during that week. At the end of the week, the 5 highest Lunchwalla Point earners for the week will receive a $25 American Express Gift Card.

Now that’s the type of real-world integration we like to see – straight-up money rewards. The service has a list of rules available for its points program on its website.

Discuss

After a number of beta releases over the course of the last few months, Opera just released the first stable version of its Opera 10.52 browser for the Mac. This is the first production version of Opera for the Mac that features the company’s new Carakan JavaScript engine and Vega graphics library. Opera 10.52 also supports multi-touch gestures on modern Apple laptops and Growl notifications.

Sponsor

The company claims that this new version is the “world’s fastest browser.” In our somewhat unscientific tests (using the SunSpider benchmark), Opera did indeed best the latest development version of Chrome by a small margin (512ms vs. 571ms). During actual usage, this speed difference is hardly noticeable, however.

The Mac version is generally on par with the Windows version that Opera released in March 2010. Opera for the Mac features the company’s widget platform, Opera Turbo for faster browsing on slow networks, Opera Link for bookmark syncing and support for HTML5 and CCS3.

While it’s somewhat hidden in the sidebar, the Mac version of Opera also features Opera Unite, the web and media server that the company now builds into its desktop browsers.

For a more detailed look at all of the new features in Opera 10.52 for the Mac, also have a look at our earlier review of the Windows version.

Discuss

Now that Facebook allows developers to store data for more than 24 hours, social media analytics firms like Sysomos are finally able to include public updates from Facebook users in their databases. Sysomos began surfacing this data on some of its customers’ accounts yesterday and plans to roll these new features out to the rest of its users soon.

Sponsor

Given the size of Facebook’s user base, being able to analyze this data will be a major boon for anybody who is interested in tracking these kinds of updates.

Sysomos already allowed its users to search and analyze Facebook fan pages and groups for the last few months through its MAP analytics tool. The company now also includes these updates in Heartbeat, Sysomos’ social media monitoring tool. Sysomos’ integration of the Open Graph API will surface all the activity that has been made public by a user, including status updates and public wall posts.

Thanks to Sysomos’ new ability to analyze and search public Facebook updates, we were, for example, able to track the backlash against Facebook’s “instant personalization.” According to Sysomos, only about 15% of the public updates about this topic were positive.

Are Facebook Users Aware that their Updates Will Live a Second Life in Social Media Analytics Tools?

Sysomos, of course, only pulls in public updates, but we have to wonder if most Facebook users are aware that their updates will end up in the vast data repositories of firms like Sysomos and Radian6. Given the current backlash against what some users perceive as an invasion of their privacy by Facebook, it will be interesting to see how Facebook users will react to this.

Discuss

Facebook made some of the biggest news of the week with the anouncements from its developer conference, as far as online business goes, but Google had some significant news about local search that may have taken a backseat, but should not be ignored.

The Google Local Business Center is now called Google Places, as the company aims to rebrand the product around the Place Pages it introduced last fall. Place Pages are the pages for business listings that are found in Google local searches. They contain relevant information about a business from various places on the web, such as reviews and images, as well as other info the business puts up after claiming their listing.

Is Google’s rebranded local business center a step in the right direction? Tell us what you think.

Google Places, the company says, is "just the beginning of what’s to come from our efforts to make Google more local."

New features that come along with the name change include:

1. Service areas - Businesses who travel can show the geographic areas that they cover. Those without a storefront can make their address private.

2. Advertising with Tags – For 25 bucks a month, businesses (in certain cities) can use Tags to highlight their listings on Google.com and Google Maps. These are yellow markers that let you promote important aspects of your business. They can be used for thins like coupons, photos, and other select features.  They don’t affect the rank of search results, but they give customers more information and may prove beneficial. You can expect Google to increase the number of cities where this option is available.

3. Business photo shoots – Businesses (again, in certain cities) can request a free photo shoot from Google to have the interior of their business photographed and added to their Place Page. We’ve seen Google do this in the past. Now we know what they’re doing (learn more here). You can upload your own photos as well.

4. Customized QR Codes – Google is providing customized QR codes from the Google Places Dashboard. The code will take customers to your place page, and can be used on business cards and other marketing materials. Customers can scan them with their smartphones.

5. More Favorite Places - Remember Google’s "Favorite Places" program in which the company sent brick and mortars window decals with QR codes? They’re sending them out to 50,000 more businesses in the U.S.

Google also gives businesses using Google Places info they haven’t been able to see in the past, like who’s searching for them, how they’re finding them, and where they’re coming from. This is through the dashboard, as explained in the following clip:

"One out of five searches on Google are related to location, and we want to make sure that businesses are able to be found and put their best foot forward," says Google Maps, Earth, and Local VP John Hanke.

The standard rules still apply to Google Places. Every listing must have a mailing address and there can’t be more than one listing per physical location. Even doctors with multiple practices and services that cover multiple towns shouldn’t have two listings. Google recommends in these cases that businesses use the description or categories to explain the different services offered. Google’s quality guidelines can be found here, and may be helpful to businesses with questions about their listings.

Back when Google first launched Place Pages, we asked if Google would eliminate the need for small business websites(at least brick and mortars). As Google improves this and Facebook continues to provide more opportunities for businesses, I’ll pose the question once again. To be clear, I’m not ready to give up on the website yet, but with the tools that are becoming available to businesses, do you think it is imperative to have a website these days? Share your thoughts.

Facebook is hosting its annual f8 developer conference in San Francisco today. We expect quite a few announcements around new features and products today, including more information about the availability of a firehose of user data, geotagging, payments and the rumored off-site “like” button that publishers will soon be able to embed in their pages.

Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00).

Sponsor

We will refresh this page regularly during the keynote. Please reload this page to see these updates.

9:45: Audience is getting seated.

10:01: Looks like there is a little delay. Keynote is now scheduled to start at 10:10 a.m. PST.

10:07: Rumor: Facebook and Microsoft will announce a new application partnership.

Image credit: Devin Reams.

10:11: Zuckerberg on stage.

10:12: “What we have to show you today will be one of the most transformative events on the Web.

Open Graph: Puts people at the center of the Web. “The Web can become a semantically meaningful set of connections.”

10:14: Recap of Facebook stats: 400 million users on Facebook, 100 million people use Facebook Connect.

“A lot of startups are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences.”

Policy updates: All permissions are now managed in one permissions dialog.

Cache: Developers can now store information for longer than 24 hours.

10:18: Facebook credits: More than 100 developers working with Facebook already.

10:18: Back to Open Graph: “Facebook only maps out the part of the social graph that relates to people.” Others, like Yelp and Pandora map out the social graph around other topics.

10:21: There is no way to bring these different graphs together yet. Right now, developers use the stream metaphor, but the services don’t understand these connections.

10:22: By connecting these graphs, Facebook will be able to show you restaurants your friends like, music your friends like, etc. “By doing this, the Web will get a whole lot better.”

10:23: New Graph API: Makes it simple to read connections on FB. Based on a new standard.

New plugins for sites: Make your sites instantly social and personalized.

10:24: Example: See what your friends already liked on CNN. CNN won’t know who you are or who your friends are.

On CNN homepage: See all your friends’ activity.

10:25: Bret Taylor (formerly of Friendfeed) on stage.

10:27: How do you get people to feel comfortable with importing their Facebook friends?

Experience from Friendfeed: The only signup button that mattered was Facebook Connect, because that was the best way for people to find their friends.

10:28: New products: Social plugins: add social features with just one line of HTML.

Universal like button: A like button for the Web that will instantly share your like back to FB. Based on an iframe.

10:31: Activity streams plugin: Transport the FB news feed to your site.

10:31: Recommendations plugin: Show users articles on your site that they are most likely to like. Highly personalized.

Login plugin: See which of your friends already signed up for a given service.

Social bar: The “kitchen sink” of Facebook’s new plugins. One bar at the bottom of the site will show all of these features.

10:33: Talking about the news feed: Open Graph will make the stream more useful. Allows you to markup your pages to tell Facebook what kind of real-world object your page represents. You can say, for example, that a page is about a band and where this band is from.

New section on your profile can now show which movies, songs, etc. you liked.

10:36: Launching with 30 partners today.

You can also subscribe by topics.

These likes and updates will point to sites outside of Facebook. “My identity is not just defined by Facebook but also by all of the things I do around the Web.”

10:38: Graph API: Our attempt to re-architect the Facebook platform with simplicity and the Graph API in mind.

10:40: You can download all of the connections of a given user from the Graph API.

10:41: Search: You can search through all of the public updates on Facebook.

Real-time will be built-in. Facebook will ping developers when a user posts an update.

10:42: Facebook will use oAuth 2.0. “It’s so much more awesome than our current system. Available for the Graph API and all of Facebook’s existing APIs.

10:44: Zuckerberg back on stage.

Facebook expects to service a total of 1 billion like buttons today.

10:45: “The Web is at an important turning point today.” Startups require their users to bring their real identity. “The default is now social.”

10:46: What kind of products would be possible if Facebook partners already knew everything about their users?

Microsoft Docs.com: Online version of Microsoft’s office suite. Collaborate with friends on documents.

All of the power of Microsoft Office – but with a built-in social experience.

Second example: Pandora. See what bands your friends like on Pandora.

10:50: Zuckerberg finishes the keynote with an anecdote about his girlfriend.

Discuss

The Google Local Business Center is now called Google Places, as the company aims to rebrand the product around the Place Pages it introduced last fall. Place Pages are the pages for business listings that are found in Google local searches. They contain relevant information about a business from various places on the web, such as reviews and images, as well as other info the business puts up after claiming their listing.

Is Google’s rebranded local business center a step in the right direction? Tell us what you think.

Google Places, the company says, is "just the beginning of what’s to come from our efforts to make Google more local."

New features that come along with the name change include:

1. Service areas - Businesses who travel can show the geographic areas that they cover. Those without a storefront can make their address private.

2. Advertising with Tags – For 25 bucks a month, businesses (in certain cities) can use Tags to highlight their listings on Google.com and Google Maps. These are yellow markers that let you promote important aspects of your business. They can be used for thins like coupons, photos, and other select features.  They don’t affect the rank of search results, but they give customers more information and may prove beneficial. You can expect Google to increase the number of cities where this option is available.

3. Business photo shoots – Businesses (again, in certain cities) can request a free photo shoot from Google to have the interior of their business photographed and added to their Place Page. We’ve seen Google do this in the past. Now we know what they’re doing (learn more here). You can upload your own photos as well.

4. Customized QR Codes – Google is providing customized QR codes from the Google Places Dashboard. The code will take customers to your place page, and can be used on business cards and other marketing materials. Customers can scan them with their smartphones.

5. More Favorite Places - Remember Google’s "Favorite Places" program in which the company sent brick and mortars window decals with QR codes? They’re sending them out to 50,000 more businesses in the U.S.

Google also gives businesses using Google Places info they haven’t been able to see in the past, like who’s searching for them, how they’re finding them, and where they’re coming from. This is through the dashboard, as explained in the following clip:

"One out of five searches on Google are related to location, and we want to make sure that businesses are able to be found and put their best foot forward," says Google Maps, Earth, and Local VP John Hanke.

The standard rules still apply to Google Places. Every listing must have a mailing address and there can’t be more than one listing per physical location. Even doctors with multiple practices and services that cover multiple towns shouldn’t have two listings. Google recommends in these cases that businesses use the description or categories to explain the different services offered. Google’s quality guidelines can be found here, and may be helpful to businesses with questions about their listings.

Back when Google first launched Place Pages, we asked if Google would eliminate the need for small business websites(at least brick and mortars). As Google improves this and Facebook continues to provide more opportunities for businesses, I’ll pose the question once again. To be clear, I’m not ready to give up on the website yet, but with the tools that are becoming available to businesses, do you think it is imperative to have a website these days? Share your thoughts.

Earlier in the week, we profiled Concept Feedback, a community that helps site designers and developers get quick constructive criticism on their various projects, and in the article we stressed the importance for young companies to collect and analyze user feedback. Another part of this type of site analysis is tracking bugs, and TechStars graduate SnapABug provides an innovative way to do this via live instant message sessions. Early next week, however, SnapABug will take this feature one step further by adding a pro-active chat feature which will allow companies to both help wayward visitors and capitalize on possible sales opportunities.

Sponsor

SnapABug is a service that companies can embed on their website that allows customers to submit a form reporting problems or bugs with the site. Customers could also choose to speak with a support agent after submitting their comment, but with the service’s forthcoming new features, a chat session is automatically created when users linger on a single page for a few minutes. If the user decides to chat, the support agent is then connected and takes control of the previously automated message.

For support agents, they can use any instant messaging client they choose, even mobile clients on smartphones, to provide instant customer service on bugs and potentially drive sales. They can view a screenshot of the page the viewer is on as well as contextual information including where the visitor is browsing from. The details of the customer’s bug report can also be synced with existing CRMs and bug trackers, such as ZenDesk, Salesforce and FogBugz.

I can see this being a useful tool for a company in the early development stages to squash bugs as they appear to visitors, but part of the reason SnapABug is rolling out the pro-active chat feature is that companies were finding the support discussions were turning into sales opportunities.

“With the introduction of live chat, several customers started using SnapABug as a sales tool, and their feedback was extremely positive,” the company says. “The pro-active chat feature adds a key functionality for them to be even more successful in closing sales.”

On the other hand, this type of tool could be seen by customers as intrusive and an annoyance, so it is smart that the chat only pops up after a couple minutes of inactivity. It would behoove businesses to not over use this feature or to set a quicker time limit on the pro-active chat, lest their handy new chat tool be compared to Microsoft Office’s “Clippy.” So before you go poking into your visitor’s browsers, make sure you don’t over use the service and annoy customers.

If businesses can find a balance between helpful and intrusive, this could be a useful tool for guiding site visitors toward sign ups or sales, and for finding and addressing bugs in real time.

Discuss

OffiSync is launching an all-new version of its Microsoft Office to Google Docs synchronization tool, a plugin that’s a “must-have” for anyone still straddling the two worlds of office suites: that is, the desktop-based world of Microsoft software and the web-based world of Google Docs. In the updated version of OffiSync, set to arrive minutes from now, you’ll be able to co-author documents in real-time between Microsoft Office and Google Docs, no matter what version of the Office software you use. There are a few other new features too, including improvements to search, added Google Sites support and the ability to store any file type, but it’s the co-authoring feature that’s today’s biggest reveal.

Sponsor

Real-Time Co-Authoring!

Previously, the OfficSync plugin integrated into Microsoft Office’s toolbar, appearing as a new menu or tab in its ribbon interface. From here, you could choose to open, save, search or share a Microsoft Office file in any of the suite’s flagship programs (Word, Excel or PowerPoint).

However, when it came to the “collaboration” aspect – the standout feature of Google Docs, OfficSync only provided the tools that gave others’ access to files hosted on Google Docs. It didn’t provide the real-time editing capabilities, such as those found in Google’s spreadsheets program (or, as of yesterday, in Google’s documents program, too).

But now, OfficSync users can use the software of their choice – Office or Docs – and their changes are sent to the other collaborators in real-time. The changes don’t magically occur, keystroke by keystroke, but are pushed to others when the “Save” button is clicked in Microsoft Office or when changes to the Google Docs online version are saved. Office users will see a pop-up message informing them the file was changed and they can then preview the changes, ignore them or update the file. That message is sent in real-time to all users.

You can see the co-authoring feature in action here on YouTube. 

Other Features

In addition to the standout real-time collaboration feature, OfficSync also now includes a few other features worth mentioning too, such as:

• Support for any file type: OfficSync now supports Docs’ ability to store files of any type. What this means for Office users is that you can chose to store your Office documents in their native format without “converting” them to Google Docs format. This is ideal for preserving some of the advanced formatting that Docs doesn’t support.
• Improved Google Sites Support: OfficSync automatically detects all the Google Sites you have access to and lets you edit those files. You can even create new Google Sites from within Office.
• OfficSync Task Pane: A sidebar panel for Office that shows collaborators, recent documents, documents starred in Google Docs, recently shared documents and more.
• Improved Integrated Search: The new version includes improved integrated Google Search/Google Image Search functionality, available from the toolbar.
• Beta support for Office 2010, the next release of Microsoft Office software, itself still in beta, too.

To download the newly updated OfficSync plugin, visit offisync.com/download (available at approximately 12:30 PM EST today).

Discuss

Google has announced a number of significant changes to Google Docs. In fact, they’re so significant, Google is referring to them as the "next generation of Google Docs." Included, are some Google Wave-like characteristics.

Some new features:

- A margin ruler (Documents)
- Better numbering and bullets (Documents)
- Easier image placement options (Documents)
- Formula editing bar (Spreadsheets)
- Cell auto-complete (Spreadsheets)
- Drag-and-drop columns (Spreadsheets)

But that’s not all. "We’ve made big improvements to our document upload feature so moving files from your computer to the cloud is easier now," says Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. "Imported documents retain their original structure more accurately, so you can hit the ground running editing in the browser without having to fix formatting like bullets and text alignment."

"New browser technologies like faster JavaScript processing have made it possible for us to speed up Google Docs significantly," he adds. "Even very large spreadsheets are fast to work with in your browser now. Applications that run this fast feel like desktop applications but have the unique advantages of being in the cloud."

Google has also extended Google Docs collaboration capabilities, with support for up to 50 people working together at a time. Users can now see other people’s edits in real-time (much like Google Wave).

New Google Docs features will be rolled out over the next few days. Interested parties who would like to learn more about these first hand, may want to check out a webinar Google is hosting tomorrow, in which they will go over the changes in more detail.

The popular location-based services Foursquare and Gowalla were launched at the 2009 SXSW, and one year later, many proclaimed the 2010 SXSW to be the year of “location, location, location”. With almost 350,000 Foursquare check-ins during one day of the event, and with numerous location-based services launching before, during, and after SXSW, the buzz among early adopters surrounding location-based social networking seems to show no signs of abating.

Sponsor

In a provocative (and NSFW) blog post this weekend, entrepreneur and developer Dave McClure takes both location-based social networks and their early adopters to task, arguing that “the current method of check-ins is a classic case of early-adopter lust for shiny objects, & has not a damn thing to do with long-term sustainable mainstream consumer behavior.” Dismissing the lure of the game-mechanics that many of these platforms utilize – the idea of collecting badges, points, and/or mayorships – McClure contends that until LBS start offering some sort of simple monetary incentive, mainstream users will not be compelled to check-in. Whether or not you agree with McClure’s pronouncements and predictions about location-based social networks, his comments about “early-adopter lust for shiny objects” are worth considering.

Although conventional wisdom posits that early adopters provide a solid target market for startups, there are some drawbacks in responding focusing solely on those who “lust for shiny objects.”

Early adopters’ enthusiasm may not always be a good indication of future growth and sustainability. Although early adopters are often willing to provide feedback on a product’s development, that feedback might not be the information necessary to woo a larger market. Early adopters’ feedback on existing features and push for new features might not necessarily be the feedback necessary for features that mainstream users would want or need. The push for special stamps and badges from Gowalla and Foursquare might excite early adopters, for example, but mainstream users may not find this a compelling reason to adopt a service. The lure of other social networks, such as Facebook, is in part that “everyone is there.” The question remains how to make the move from just the early adopters to “everyone” being there.

Nevertheless, early adopters can be terrific champions of a product, actively promoting it to their friends. Early adopters are a small, but vocal group. Ignore them at your peril. And focus exclusively on them at your peril.

Discuss

Last week brought two major announcements from Twitter. On Thursday, the company announced an official application for BlackBerry. On Friday, Twitter announced that it had purchased Atebits, the makers of the iPhone app Tweetie. Over the weekend, there was substantial discussion and a fair amount of hand-wringing by third-party developers, many expressing their frustrations about the company’s direction. Attempting to reassure developers in advance of next week’s Chirp conference, Twitter API lead Ryan Sarver responded by email to some of these concerns.

Sponsor

Certainly Twitter isn’t the only company at the center of debates about control of a platform (Apple, Google, and Microsoft come to mind), but in light of the flurry of responses to Twitter’s moves, it is worth considering some of the (perhaps contradictory) lessons for startups that can be gleaned from the past week’s events.

Find your niche: Much of the third-party development on Twitter has served to address gaps in the original product: mobile clients, URL shorteners, photo sharing, and search for example. As VC and Twitter investor Fred Wilson argued in a blog post early last week that tipped the hand, perhaps, to where Twitter was headed, there is still room for the development of “killer apps” in social gaming, enterprise, and analytics.

Innovate and adapt: Find your niche, but then be prepared to innovate and adapt. Some have suggested that Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie might not bode well for other Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck, unless the two can continue to innovate. By adding new features unavailable via the Twitter website, and by linking streams from Facebook and LinkedIn, they have established themselves as more than just a Twitter client – but the pressure is certainly on for these to continue to distinguish themselves from the official Twitter applications. “Of course we’re hole fillers,” Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur admits, explaining that while that’s a good place to start, it isn’t the right place to end.

Look beyond the platform: As Mark Suster writes of both Twitter and the iPhone, it is important to think beyond the platform, contending that startups should not think of Twitter “as a business but rather as a channel.” In other words, a platform like Twitter should be a used as a way to reach customers but, unless you’re Twitter, should not be the vehicle itself.

If this is the “inflection point” for Twitter, the tasks for startups will be to learn the lessons from this critical juncture in the platform’s history, balancing the sometimes contradictory needs for specificity and flexibility and innovation and stability.

Discuss

Google has announced a number of significant changes to Google Docs. In fact, they’re so significant, Google is referring to them as the "next generation of Google Docs." Included, are some Google Wave-like characteristics.

Some new features:

- A margin ruler (Documents)
- Better numbering and bullets (Documents)
- Easier image placement options (Documents)
- Formula editing bar (Spreadsheets)
- Cell auto-complete (Spreadsheets)
- Drag-and-drop columns (Spreadsheets)

But that’s not all. "We’ve made big improvements to our document upload feature so moving files from your computer to the cloud is easier now," says Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. "Imported documents retain their original structure more accurately, so you can hit the ground running editing in the browser without having to fix formatting like bullets and text alignment."

"New browser technologies like faster JavaScript processing have made it possible for us to speed up Google Docs significantly," he adds. "Even very large spreadsheets are fast to work with in your browser now. Applications that run this fast feel like desktop applications but have the unique advantages of being in the cloud."

Google has also extended Google Docs collaboration capabilities, with support for up to 50 people working together at a time. Users can now see other people’s edits in real-time (much like Google Wave).

New Google Docs features will be rolled out over the next few days. Interested parties who would like to learn more about these first hand, may want to check out a webinar Google is hosting tomorrow, in which they will go over the changes in more detail.