Generic Synthetic

I knew about Google Spreadsheets, which I played with a bit, but now they have a full featured word processor. I don’t really see myself using an online application, but it looks pretty nifty, even if just to convert to PDF:

Google Docs & Spreadsheets
With Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you can:

* Use our online editor to format documents, spell-check and more.
* Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text.
* Download documents to your desktop as Word, PDF and more.
* View your documents’ revision history and roll back to any version.

Plus, since its online, you can:

* Invite others to share your documents by e-mail address.
* Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
* Publish documents online to the world, or to just who you choose.
* Post your documents to your blog.

Update: It can also act as a weblog editor and upload to all the standard systems. And it has spell checking. That makes it a bit more interesting.  It still isn’t MS Office, and probably never will be.  But who knows, anything could (literally) happen.

Update 2: Although I’m not overly excited about this, I have thought for awhile that Google will eventually take over the world.  Having an online office suite is just another part of that.  I didn’t quite understand the Google-YouTube deal, and why it would be worth so much money, but I suppose that selling ads that get viewed 100 million times a day might be worth something.