My decision the other day to investigate the applicability of software as a service for the memi project has had some interesting preliminary results.

Firstly, I downloaded the trial server edition of ThinkFree and duly played around with it. It certainly does what it claims to do: clones Microsoft Word with a slavish attention to detail. Unfortunately a freely downloadable version of bloatware was not what I had in mind – especially since it loads noticeably more sluggishly than the original.One thing I had got used to with Writely was tagging documents instead of putting them into folders, and unfortunately ThinkFree‘s determination to emulate MS Word means that this option is not available (or at least not as far as I could see). I find tagging infintely more useful than folders and so, for that reason alone, I uninstalled ThinkFree.

Since Google have comprehensively destroyed Writely’s original interface, I no longer find it a pleasure to use. Indeed recently I have found myself struggling to find out how to do simple operations.

So I checked out Zoho again, prompted partly by this comparison of online word processors from Andy Merrill.

Camie and I had originally looked at this when we first adopted Writely, and it had seemed good. Now, since Writely’s recent downgrade, it seems even better. And it now has APIs that you can use to save documents on your own server – thus answering my worry about where my documents should be.

I got a Zoho account and spent an hour moving my documents form Google Docs to Zoho. All was well. Then I started looking at the Zoho blogs, and discovered that it is developing at a rapid rate and that it has all sorts of hidden features. You can post directly to a blog, and you can turn tags into virtual folders, thus getting the best of both worlds.

There I also discovered that Zoho have teamed up with Omnidrive, who offer a free one gig online storage space. I looked at this and got myself one. In its present state it seems like a good idea. Insofar as it is in a state of continuing development it seems like something worth being a part of.

You can set files to be shared, and you can read files online using the Zoho suite before you download them.

I should also point out that the Zoho APIs are public and other people have been adding them to their services too. One of Omnidrive’s leading competitors, Box.net, has followed suit and added Zoho compatibility to its services.

All this chatter about free file storage led me to google around a bit, and eventually look at 4000webs.com who offer free web hosting with php and MySQL – and no ads at all. I decided to switch some of our lesser used web sites there soon as an experiment.

Then I noticed that Adobe now have Remix, their online video editing software, working, and they are promising to introduce a free online version of Photoshop very soon.

Finally I found flixn, where you can make a video directly from your webcam, save it online, and then embed it in your blog, your MySpace account, or anywhere else. It allows you to do things like this in seconds – assuming you ever want to do things like this.

This might help DINA with one of the remaining problems in the forthcoming mobile television extravaganza that I will describe in more detail in a month or so.