Techtear: writewith



  • Hi, my name is David Alayón and I'm going to interview Eric Eldon, one of the WriteWith creators. Can you introduce yourself? Tell us something about you?
I've lived in the Bay Area since 2000, first as a college student; I worked for a number of years at The Stanford Daily, a student newspaper. I graduated with a degree in International Relations in 2005. In what spare time I have now, I also write for a Silicon Valley tech blog called VentureBeat.com. Yes, I use writewith when I write my articles!
  • Let's start talking about the beginning: How did WriteWith started? Who came up with the idea? How many people are involved in it?
One of my cofounders, Martin Goldman, was a computer science student at Binghamton University in New York. He was also an editor at his student newspaper, called Pipe Dream. He noticed that the newsroom was having a lot of trouble staying organized and keeping track of drafts of their stories. He built newsroom software to manage the editorial process: who had what assignment, who had written which draft of a story.

I had the some problems at The Stanford Daily. I started looking around for a solution. Martin and I met at a college newspaper conference... around that time, my friend Phil Kast built The Stanford Daily a new web site... the three of us decided to start a company building web software for college newspapers. However, we've made it so that anyone can sign up for free at www.writewith.com.
  • Define WriteWith with three words?
Write together better.
  • What do you think is the strongpoint of WriteWith?
The ability to communicate about what you do to the people you're working with, and to understand what they're doing.
  • What makes WriteWith different from other "share docs applications"?
We improve the group experience by including lightweight features for groups, such as tasks, notes, a history of everything that happens in the document and an easy-to-compare sequence of revisions (like a wiki).
  • I hate comparisons but do you think people would compare WriteWith with Google Docs?
There are many online word processors. Most of them focus on copying core features of Microsoft Word to the web, but don't really focus on how the editorial process works for multiple people. That said, Google Docs (and many of the others) are well-designed applications, and I expect them to keep innovating.
  • Did something funny happened while you where working in the WriteWith project?
I'll change that question to "fun."

We've had the chance to travel around the continent quite a bit. We've even gone to Canada a couple of times over the past year for conferences -- one of our funders is the Canadian University Press, a national cooperative of Canadian college and university newspapers. Since there are students and recent graduates running the organization, and because they make money through owning a national advertising agency for college newspapers, they are able to invest in companies like us. And have a good time!

We were also at a college media conference in St. Louis at the same time that the Cardinals won the World Series -- a few blocks away from the hotel we were at. The whole city went crazy and we were in the middle of it. That was fun to see, even though I'm a Mariners fan.
  • What is the worst thing that someone told you about WriteWith?
The worst thing is when they don't tell us anything!
  • Did anyone tell you any improvement that you haven't consider and now are you working on it?
Oh yes. People have all sorts of ideas for ways we could improve. In fact, deciding what to do has been one of our biggest challenges. Some people want more formatting options, some want live editing, some want _________. Since we're a small company, we can only focus on one thing at a time.
  • Can you tell us, just a little, about what new stuff will come with the next version of writewith?
We're thinking more about how to improve the group experience on the site. How do you build software so that 50 or 60 people can work well together on a set of documents? We're finding out.
  • A secret of writewith?
There are actually 4 of us, not 3. Jessica Wolfe, a friend of our's who lives in Washington, D.C. also works with us (she just has another full-time job right now).

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"Then a conclusion and I will write down your email address and say that if someone had any questions o suggestions about WriteWith, they are free to contact to you. Its that ok?"

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Yeah, thanks!