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Scribd, the document sharing and hosting service, has rebranded and tweaked its Facebook application this morning. Its new name is Share Homework, and the goal, according to Scribd, is to use it as a go-between for students and teachers to share documents with each other, and to help students do something about the documents that have been sitting unused for years on their hard drives.

There's no real changes, besides a tweaked user interface and a new name (from the previous moniker of "Facebook Apps"). The tool is still a super-simple way to share documents and little … Read more

The next time you complain that your keyboard has too many keys, remember that things could always be worse--consider the "Chromatone CT-312."

This one's actually for music, not computing, a synthesizer with hundreds of unlabeled keys that would surely drive us nuts (312, to be exact--hence the number in the name). Technabob aptly describes a "baffling chart" that's supposed to make sense of the Chromatone, but that only makes it worse. There's actually a method to its apparent madness, he says, based on a 19th century concept called the "Janko keyboard" … Read more

This morning Google updated their Docs and Spreadsheets service with a new start page, one that turns the old list view into a two-pane workspace. Users can now see a larger listing of their documents and spreadsheets, as well as organize them in folders. Yes, you read that right--Google is letting users create and manage their stuff in folders. Users can even drag and drop files.

I actually asked the Docs and Spreadsheets team about a feature like this last week, and they told me the combination of tags and search worked better. The new system continues to tag items--albeit … Read more

I spent part of today at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., talking to some of the folks behind Google Docs & Spreadsheets, part of Google's Web-based office suite. I asked the product experts I met for their favorite features that often don't get the limelight or that people simply don't know about. I picked five that I thought were worth sharing:

1. Live lookup via Google and Google Finance. This is only available for Spreadsheets, but it's one of the neater advanced tidbits that makes use of Internet connectivity. Using two special formulas, users … Read more

Category: Productivity

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a free, Web-based collaborative office suite. Users can make and share documents and spreadsheets with anyone who has a Google account. What makes the service really interesting is that multiple users can be working on the same document at the same time. All files are stored for free on Google's servers, and they can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection.

While you need to be hooked up to the Internet to use these apps, you're also able to export Google Docs & Spreadsheets files to work with Microsoft … Read more

Google has added a new option to Google Docs and Spreadsheets to make files open for others to look at without the need to register or sign in with a Google account. To make any doc or spreadsheet open, users can click option for "invitations may be used by anyone" in the "Share" tab. Once enabled, any invite to view the spreadsheet will take users right to it, bypassing any annoying log-in screens. Users will still need to log in and be on the collaborators list to make any editing changes, but this should open things … Read more

Google on Thursday at its Developer Day announced Google Gears, a browser plug-in that lets people run Web applications offline. The first application to use Google Gears is Google Reader, its Web-based RSS feed reading application.

The download for the Google Gears beta is quick--the files are less than 1MB in size. Once you have it installed, the Web application you're connecting to asks you whether you want to allow it to store data locally.

Here's a news story with more details, including the technology architecture of Google Gears.

Although it stayed away from making specific commitments, we … Read more

Tomorrow, ThinkFree will announce a new way to publish documents: ThinkFree Docs. The feature looks a lot like Scribd: It's a publicly accessible, YouTube-like document directory. And like YouTube, documents stored on it can be embedded in blogs and Web sites.

Docs rounds out the publishing options for the online suite ThinkFree, which already had a method for sharing documents that's much like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and other online productivity suites: from within the suite, you can e-mail an invitation to other people so they can view or edit your documents on the ThinkFree site. That's what you want for collaboration. But when you want to publish a document to the world at large, you might want the much simpler ThinkFree Docs instead--it will spare viewers unfamiliar with ThinkFree the confusion of using a new service.

You can use Docs independently of the ThinkFree suite. The service does a decent job of displaying standard Microsoft Office (2003 format) files, as well as other formats like PDF and RTF.

As on media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, shared files all get their own comment threads. Docs' commenting system is rudimentary, though, and the comments are not visible or accessible when a document is embedded on another site. For that matter, very little else is available from an embedded document. There's no way to download a file, nor is there a link to the file's dedicated URL, where the download link, embed codes, and comment board reside. Scribd, by contrast, offers links back to the sharing page on the Scribd site, as well as download and other useful links.

ThinkFree Docs is a useful feature for ThinkFree suite users who want to publish their documents to the Web, but as a standalone document sharing site it comes up a bit short.

Below: An embedded ThinkFree Docs viewer.

… Read more

We realize not everyone uses Firefox to browse the Web, but for those who do, there's a really great extension that's been getting a lot of buzz lately. It's called Customize Google and it does just that. You can customize every service Google offers, from basic tasks such as automatically redirecting to the secure versions of Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets, to actually adding links to other search services such as MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.com. Social bookmarking nuts can also add links to services such as Reddit, Digg, and Del.icio.us, right … Read more