During the beta period, Writely is free.

Yet, check this out:

Will you start showing Google ads in my documents?

And if you were wondering like I was, it looks like Writely has added Mac support.  They still aren't taking new users yet, but there's a waiting list.

Well, now, isn't this fascinating - Yahoo acquired del.icio.us. Wonder if this means I'll be able to stop using the combination bookmarklet for del.icio.us and My Web 2.0 at some point and get one bookmarklet to rule them all. Automagic sync between del.icio.us and My Web 2.0 bookmarks? Or will the services get merged somehow? Anybody have predictions they want to throw down?

One of the big ticket items of the day was the launch of Yahoo Answers, which aims to be every bit the community-powered knowledge base that Google Answers isn't. Both allow you to ask questions, but the latter's queries are answered by pre-screened experts while Yahoo is taking a long-tail, wisdom of crowds approach - any Yahoo member can answer a question, and user ratings determine the "best" of the crop. A reputation system will supposedly weed out the experts from the spammers.

I'm all for the experiment and I'm quite curious to see how it turns out. It would be nice to have a general one-stop shop for this kind of collective Q & A, as opposed to tracking down and poking through various subject-specific user forums. Also, this service has promise to capture the more ephemeral day-to-day questions that don't really fit into any of those forums: "What are some good gift ideas for moms?" "How can I learn to breakdance?" (despite popular opinion, I did not submit that one.)

But, as an experiment, it faces many of the same challenges those user forums have faced (and many failed) before. Greg Linden notes (via Pete Cashmore) that popularity voting does not truth make. Gary Price notes that spam, scams, infomercials and troublemakers are all very likely outcomes for the user community to police on its own, as Yahoo currently has no plans to maintain the knowledgebase. I suppose we'll know if the service becomes successful when Andrew Orlowski starts writing scathing invectives about it.

Alright, so I'm fascinated with lists lately (which is timely as OPML seems to be the Flickr of document standards these days). I'm also curious to know what social services folks are actually using the most, beyond whatever is the latest hot company we're talking about on the blawgs. So, in light of both of these things, I'm kicking off an informal poll: what are your top five favorite social software services currently in use? I'll start:

1. (drumroll, please)... Flickr. Shocking, I know.

2. del.icio.us

3. My Web 2.0 - I tend to store everything in My Web 2.0 and only a subset of things to del.icio.us, but I use both frequently to find cool stuff.

4. Memeorandum - when I need news fast, which is all the time, this is what I use.

5. YouTube is emerging as a new favorite. I like that I can so easily embed video on my own blogs.

A nice solid honorable mention goes to last.fm which is dutifully logging what my media server is playing even when I'm not hanging out on the site finding new music.

Aight, peeps, I'm passing the mic - what are your top 5 faves?

We had done a successful "How would you change..." feature series over on Engadget that TUAW also recently took up with the "You're in charge..." series. The idea is, pick a gadget/application/web service and create a massively multiplayer wishlist for that thing. Seems like this could work well in SocialSoftwareLandia, so let's see how it goes - How would you change Flickr? I'll start with a few, then please throw your wishlist into the comments...

• Local interestingness - see the most interesting photos only from my contacts / friends / family.

• Interestingness reverse lookup - when viewing one of my photos, I want a way to find out how "interesting" it is - is it in my top 200? Is it #437? How interesting (or not...) is it for this day on Flickr?

• I often wish I could collect other people's photos into sets.

• Some more elegant way to keep track of the 290 groups I'm in... maybe some sort of dashboard page I could drop a few groups into at a time and just monitor several at any one time.

Tag... you're it! How would you change Flickr?

The Grand Poobahs of Snark over at Supr.c.ilio.us have done us a favor by rounding up the spoofs, fake "services" and Web 2.0 jokes in the Great Web 2.0 Joke List. Head on over when in danger of taking the hype too seriously, or when in need of a good laugh...

Wayfaring is a service that allows you to create your own customized and annotated Google Map and share it. Or, just browse the maps others have created - from the Philadelphia Marathon route to LA gay bars to best places to snorkel on Maui. You can leave comments on each map or contact the mapmaker directly with questions. This is cool on a large scale to share points of interest with a wide audience, or on a small scale to set up a map of your family's recent road trip to share with your friends, e.g. - I like that it works on both levels. The keys will be getting people to come contribute to another data silo, and making sure folks can easily find something interesting when they're browsing/searching.

[Hat tip to Marshall Kirkpatrick and Narendra Rocherolle for the heads up!]

Couldn't pass this one up... Web 2.0 bingo should be a mandatory session at your next conference/geek dinner/____Camp.

[Via del.icio.us]

Want to get the best of digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular all in one place? You're in luck! Check out diggdot.us for this particular blend of social news mashup.

[Thx, Jason!]

The new look for del.icio.us splits the interface in half, placing popular links on the right and recent links on the left. Great... what's next? :)

[Via Tech Crunch]

Haven't seen any confirmation or anything other than the standard "we can't comment" since the rumours of Google flirting with Riya started flying. Riya (nee Ojos) uses face recognition technology to help autotag your photo collection. I got a demo of Riya from the uber-fun Tara Hunt at Tagcamp and was pretty impressed - you train the software simply by tagging a few photos of someone, and it then automagically finds other photos of that person and autotags them. It's not perfect yet, but it did make an impressive number of correct matches, even identifying photos where the person's face was turned or in shadow, etc.

Of course I'm going to complain that it's Windows-only (and IE6 only, even, blech!)... which makes it a perfect candidate for the Goog, who loves to stick it to Mac users. ;) Riya plans Firefox and Mac support in the future, so I'm complaining now while the complaining is good. Anywho - you know how rumours are, and we may still not know anything even after Riya's launch party tonight at TechCrunch central.

Om has more on the rumours.

[Via Memeorandum]

So the Google Base service that was sniffed out last month is now live. Google Blogoscoped has a nice review of the app with screenshots. Haven't tried it myself yet and honestly, I'm not that excited about it. Enough of my Base already belongs to Google, really, and it's difficult to garner any enthusiasm for Yet Another Walled Data Garden. YMMV - let us know in the comments if you're make use of Google Base and what you like/dislike about the service.

It only seems logical there would be a collaborative effort to add a folksonomy component to world mapping - enter Tagzania. Whereas 43places is more travel-oriented, focused on photos and user experience and stories of places, Tagzania makes use of the Google maps API to actually add tags to the maps themselves - so you can set a waypoint and tag it up. Each waypoint then becomes a "page" with an RSS feed, to track what other users add over time. All content submitted becomes open content under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

[Via Smartmobs]

As a travel buff, I'm digging on the new 43places social travel site, done by the 43things Robot Co-op folks. It's yet another Ruby on Rails site, cleanly designed and easy to use, and has the potential to become quite addictive. You can specify the places on your travel wishlist and find out what others have said about those locations, as well as flag the places you've been and rate them, relate an experience, and upload photos. There's also a - bless them - folksonomy component for tagging places, and a whole myriad of ways to find people you might want to connect with - because they're geographically close to you, they live in the places you want to go, or they want to go to the same places you do. Another way cool feature is that if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them with place names and use a Creative Commons license, 43places will pick them up via the magic that is web services. Now if you'll pardon me, I'm off to keep procrastinating feeding my wanderlust. See you in Tibet!