Seems like the last few weeks have been pretty hectic around here – last week especially was a blur!

The week before last we had Thomas and Johannes back for another internship – this time as bloggers. What an amazing job they did!
Kevin and I had a fresh determination – after the holidays- to put some of our ideas that had been sitting on the backburners- onto the front ones- and the timing couldn’t have been better. The lads took to blogging like fish to water- and what we ended up with was our first topical blog: Adgames.

Not bad for a weeks work. We found it hard to understand how the guys could survive on generic cola and chips for their daily diet… but they didn’t pass out or anything, and they seemed to enjoy themselves.

Your T-shirts are in the mail – to us; we’ll let you know when they arrive, guys!

Recently I had been trying out some of these online web 2.0 webtools like DropSend, Google Calender, Basecamp – all of which are nice indeed for organizing. One that I came across, in an effort to find a tool that could help us store ideas and texts in an easily accessable place- was Writley. Not the Writely you see now, mind you, but the Beta. Before Google.

Now I am not an Office / Word Processor fan, by any means, but I thought we had to get our texts organized, and in a format that we could all handle here at UOVO. Text Edit just didn’t cut it. All those documents flying about on our desktops, texts being sent back and forth through iChat (even though we sit right across from eachother) for editing before sending as emails, or plopping on blogs, etc… just got messy. I wanted a storage space for co-writing.

There are a few programs out there for this, but since I have a penchant for design, I was drawn to Writely. It looked cozy, like a writer’s corner in some writer’s cozy, bookfilled house.
I could imagine a writer sitting infront of his computer tapping away, like he used to on an Underwood, right there on Writely. There must have been a cuppa tea beside the computer, as well.. and stacks of scrawled pages… maybe even a pipe. Maybe not the writer’s pipe, because that’s not healthy- but it might have been Mark Twain’s corncob pipe? Who knows. I felt like writing. So I did. I signed up, logged on and before I knew it, I had the startings of a short story. The next day I started a brainstorming text on an idea we talked over earlier in the day.

Finally I had found exactly what I was looking for.

Then Google showed up. I knew it was coming. I had seen the announcements about the acquisition and how -soon -it would be integrated with Google logins, etc. Yesterday, along with the news of Google buying YouTube, I took a look at my Writely. It was gone. The coziness was painted over with Google whitewash. It had become as friendly as, dare I say it? ?!&%#”/ Office! Come On! Google THIS!

I have nothing against Google, mind you- but that pissed me off. Did they have to bulldoze the thing, really?

Just when I thought there was hope on that whole word processor front- they go and do that. Rip the human touch right out of something nice. Damn.

Yeah.. I’ll still use it. I went to all the trouble to sign up and get familiar with it, so I might as well give it a fair shot. It’s just so dissapointing to have to come HERE to feel good about the old days (I only had 2!) with Writely (Beta).

Kudos to the folks that sold it to Google, well done, for sure.
But today I will hold a minute of silence for the good ol’ days.

Anna and Emily playing with front row. Aren’t they cute!
Post published with ECTO. Seems very slick.

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