We use Google Docs for a lot of our editing and collaboration at VentureBeat, but the lack of commenting features is a real pain -- documents can drown in all-caps statements like "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?" and "DELETE THIS NOW OR YOU'RE FIRED." So there's real appeal to a new service called SharedDoc, which allows lots of people to comment on a document while leaving the original text untouched.
There are other commenting tools out there, the most notable being the ability to comment in Microsoft Word itself. SharedDocs has the obvious advantage of being online, so everyone is working on the same copy rather than emailing an attachment around.
It's going up against other online document systems, plus the fact that Microsoft is preparing a web version of Word, but SharedDoc has some real selling points. For one thing, it's easy to start and navigate a conversation in the comments. Each set of comments is attached to paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or individual words, and can be viewed in chronological order, like an email thread. You can also filter by a specific group or time, for example if you invited many people to comment on a document over several weeks, but now only want to see comments made by your core team in the last day. You can also save a document with comments as a PDF, and then print it out.
SharedDoc was created by a New York-based company called SharedBook, whose other products include Blog2Print, which turns blogs into printed books. Chief executive Caroline Vanderlip said that with user names and a time stamp attached to every comment, an annotated SharedDoc could become an important business document.
"This can replace 20 drafts stored in a file drawer," she said. "You have one record of how the conversation or negotiation proceeded."
SharedDoc is expanding from an invite-only beta test this week -- it's still in beta mode, but now anyone can sign up. The company also plans to expand from Word documents to other Office and Open Office documents.
