Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online.

Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online.

Gliffy is nice, simple, online tool for creating diagrams and, like so many tools do now, it allows for collaboration. I think this fills in a small gap in the collaborative tools gamut needed for writing documents.

Now, if we add in a charting & graphing tool, that could take data from a Google Spreadsheet, and a vector drawing tool and mash all these together with Writely, we would have a great online, collaborative solution for writing scientific documents.

Google Spreadsheets

Google has let their on-line, collaborative spreadsheet application out into the world. So far, it looks fantastic. A good, solid set of features (less than Excel, but it's the stuff we need 99% of the time). For basic, day-to-day spreadsheet tasks, it's quite capable. Additionally, it can read and write Excel files, so that 1% of the time, when some heavy calculations or advanced features are required, the same spreadsheets can be tossed into Excel.

The best part is that this is a collaborative application. Spreadsheets can be edited by several people at concurrently. They even thought to put a little chat window in there to keep the authors' interaction easy.

It's still in limited availability, so if you need in, just ask me nice.

Planzo.com

Planzo.com

Another online calendar, this one is being used by David. It seems to have a comparable feature set to Google Calendar, but without the searching and iCal support. However, it does have some more refined categorisation and custimisation options. Definitely one worth looking at when deciding on an online calendaring service to use.