DoingText – Online Text Collaboration Tool

DoingText is a Berlin-based application which launched late last year. DoingText is a group-editable text tool which allows you to create, upload and share documents which can then be edited. The editing works very similar to the Microsoft Word revisions tool. Each person’s changes are stored as revisions which can be viewed via a side panel (see below) or you can also view all of the changes in a news stream format on a separate page. 

The service allows you to export to text, pdf and xml. The xml version includes the comments. I noticed some bugs when using the service in Internet Explorer. In Firefox, when you click to edit a line of text and start typing, the cursor moves to the end of the block forcing you to move back to the selected space again which can be a bit frustrating after a few instances.

DoingText is currently in private beta. If the DoingText team can build a few more simple and useful applications, they could create a paid package. I could also see DoingText as an addon for Wordpress and other blogging tools.