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May 6, 2007

Defining Google Collaboratively

Now you can use an invitation for Google Docs & Spreadsheets more than one time, so I decided to test this feature by letting you edit a document called "Define:Google". You should write your own definition for Google or edit the already existing text, like in a wiki.

You could edit the document if you had a Google Account. Unfortunately, only the first 200 people who sign in to the document can edit it (this is a limitation in Google Docs).

The document is public and will be updated after every change.

Update: 18 hours, 3010 revisions and 500 collaborators later, the 1871 words document has an interesting shape. For some reason, more than 200 people could sign in and some of them actually deleted the whole thing or duplicated the text. But I think this shows that Google Docs could become at some point a way to build cool wikis and that the selling point of Google's office suite should be collaboration.


Note: The document is no longer editable. Thanks to everyone who took the time to write something.

18 comments:

  1. Cool !

    "Google is really our friend..."

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  2. "Sorry, but the maximum number of people are already editing this document (10). Try again" :)

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  3. After clicking "Try Again" for several minutes, I finally got in and made a couple of changes. Then while tinkering with the options I noticed "Uncolaborate me".

    Now I'm guessing that while there is an upper limit of 200, by people voluntarily droping out (after making changes) they free up a spot for someone else. Does that sound right? If that is true the 200 limit isn't nearly so much of a problem. Hrd to imaging a situation where more than 200 people would need to edit a document during a small time-frame. While more might need to edit it over a much longer time-frame, sounds like this is doable.

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  4. The biggest limitation seems the number of people that can edit a document at the same time (=10).

    Anyway, the number of people that edit this doc is almost 200, so you can follow bp/cmb's advice and "uncollaborate" to let others write their thoughts.

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  5. Google is what all the others wish they were. Google is the definitive process of the internet.
    To put it in layman's terms... Google does it right..... ALL of it!!

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  6. this morning that noone else could log in but I did.

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  7. Now the document is read-only for (almost) everyone.

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  8. I have an off-topic question: When I delete a Google account, how long is this account barred from being used again by someone else?

    I didn't found an answer to this though I searched very thoroughly.

    Thank you very much.

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  9. I don't know if there's a specific time frame. The policy says it could be recycled at some point (but I don't know a specific case when they recycled an email address), that's why a good idea is to never delete a Gmail account.

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  10. Personally I'm not worried, but I think some people would be a little nervous that anyone could click on the "500 collaborators" link and see hundreds of E-mail addresses. Potential Spam problem. (Even though they opened themselves up to it by signing in to collaborate! I still think people would get nervous.) This comment might create more awareness to that potential and could create a bigger problem than there is already, So I won't be insulted if it's deleted.

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  11. I think Google assumes collaborators trust each other and it's OK to see their emails. If you're a spammer, there are a lot of ways to get lists of email addresses (including web search).

    The document could be edited for less than a day and all the collaborators were removed.

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  12. I didn't mean on Google's part. I meant the fact that you have a link to a screenshot of all the collaborators usernames.

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  13. I removed the link. It was more like a credit list, but I understand your concern.

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  14. GRRR, when someone deleted the whole thing, mine disappeared, im gonna go cry now.

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  15. Mine was deleted: "Google is."

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  16. Sorry. I fixed some of the misspellings, removed some inappropriate links and incomplete sentences. Someone even copied the whole text and pasted it three or four times, so I had some hard time keeping the text clean.

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  17. I added your concise definition at the beginning.

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