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iNetWord is more confusing than useful

iNetWord is more confusing than useful

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
Rafe Needleman

There's yet another new online word processor out there, iNetWord. This one's claim to fame is its capability to integrate with other online applications. For example, it can directly post to several blog engines.

However, released on the heels of Writely's going public (you no longer need to be invited to get a login), this product does not demo well. I admit that I didn't give myself much time to get used to it, but one shouldn't have to--it's just a word processor. Weird toolbar icons without help text (train tracks? a yin/yang symbol?) will confuse the new user more than anything else, and the devotion of fully half of the top button-bar real estate to table functions is bizarre. Worse, there's no Undo button.

Online applications can be much more useful than traditional software. When your software and your documents are stored on central servers, you can easily share and collaborate with others. iNetWord appears to have some of the machinery to enable this, but again, it's too hard to use.

To be fair, this product still has the Web 2.0-standard "beta" logo on it, but this tool is way too strange to be of use as it is. If you want to see what Web-based applications have to offer, stick with Writely or another better-developed beta, such as Zoho Writer.