ThinkFree brings social networking to documents

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 10 May 2007 12:12

Your IT - Entertainment

What if a system existed to let you publish, index, search, comment on, tag, download and otherwise do the whole ‘social networking’ thing to documents of information, be they Word, Excel, Powerpoint or PDF documents?

Although without a profile as high as that of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, the ThinkFree Office Suite is the free Web 2.0 office suite that most closely resembles the Office 2003 experience – and it’s free. Now ThinkFree is taking documents into the “Flikr” realm of social networking – and it could easily be ‘the next big thing’ for online information!

When it comes to social network, whether it’s photos, personal profiles, favorite web sites, encyclopedic information through sites like Wikipedia or other information, most of the world’s social networks give you access to publishing information, adding to it, tagging it, commenting to it or even changing it – but you need to go back to the site in question to access the information again.

While information can generally be ‘copied and pasted’ from a website into your word processor for safekeeping on your own computer, information that lives online isn’t generally easily able to be ‘compartmentalized’ and downloaded for easy offline reference – or if it is, in PDF files or other documents, it isn’t as easy to find as web pages themselves.
 
Some might say that the ability to search for discrete documents through Google or even file sharing services such as Limewire have existed for years, and while that’s certainly true, Limewire’s document sharing (and that of previous file-sharing king Kazaa) often turned up documents that people had accidentally included in their ‘shared files’ when searching their hard drives for sharable content – often documents they had no intention of sharing.

You also might say that Flikr lets you download images that you see online, thereby being discrete pieces of information, but what you’ll download isn’t the high-res original photograph, but a lower-res version that takes up less space on Flikr’s servers. Downloading documents through ThinkFreeDocs, when in .doc, .xls or .ppt form, gives you the actual original document to access, work on and modify if so desired.

The ability to add to that information is also present – something crucial in the Web 2.0 world of user generated content, as is the security of giving content creators full control over their work, letting them choose how it’s shared or credited, while also allowing them to tag files for quick identification and search optimization.

That’s what ThinkFreeDocs www.thinkfreedocs.com has created – a social network, Flikr style, for ‘documents’ of information.

Even better, the standard Office 2003-styled ‘ThinkFree Office Suite’ lets you create and edit your Office compatible documents in ThinkFree’s online interface (or in the paid downloadable offline versions) and then immediately publish those documents, should you so desire, into the ThinkFreeDocs website.

ThinkFree’s examples on how the social networking of information is described in this manner: “it is the newest way for people to come together to help each other meet, create, share and find what they need – from a template for a soccer schedule, marketing slide shows, and business plans, to a tuna casserole recipe, living wills, or screen plays hoping for discovery by an agent”.

Additional examples from ThinkFree include:

- The ability to immediately share business presentations, design templates, legal agreements, creative work, educational materials and ideas.
 - The ability to create profiles to increase a user’s presence and expertise on any subject – giving users the option of promoting their work as well as positioning it to explain its value.
- The ability for users to decide whether to share a document – contributing to more available content and templates – to or review other peoples work and contribute to the conversation.

ThinkFree claims that while other companies are working on similar systems, their users have been creating documents online for more than two years, that the creation of an online community was a natural next step, and that their community launches with 275,000 ThinkFree users.

As you’d expect, ThinkFree’s executives think it’s going to be a hit with the world’s web users. Jonathan Crow, Thinkfree’s Director of Marketing says that: “Our users are helping us shape the future of content collaboration, networking and sharing simply through the conversations we engage with them. This feedback has driven the development of the ThinkFree Docs community, which is a powerful tool for connecting, publishing, and finding the exact information your peers need - when they need it.”

Thinkfree’s CEO and Founder, TJ Kang, sees ThinkFreeDocs growing rapidly. He says that: “As cool as this community is now, it’s only going to get better in the months ahead as we add new features and users add new content. ThinkFree Docs is already empowering our users and will will continue to enhance the features, networking, ability for them to build alliances and friendships - building a global community around content creation and sharing.”

ThinkFree also tout that their backend is powered by Amazon, with Amazon Web Services, EC2 and S3 in place to keep the system up and running. Obviously, as a competitor to Google, ThinkFree needed the services of another massive web company with the resources to power such a service, and given Amazon.com’s own massive business that relies on a huge computing infrastructure, they would seem to be an ideal partner.

Amazon Web Services Director of Developer Relations, Steve Rabuchin, said that: ”We’re pleased to provide ThinkFree with infrastructure technology solutions that help them offer a better product. ThinkFree can focus on building highly differentiated productivity solutions while we focus on the undifferentiating heavy lifting of making sure those solutions scale affordably for ThinkFree.”