In yet another Google Maps upgrade in recent days, the My Maps feature has been opened up for collaboration. That means that you and your friends can add markers (with custom icons and pictures if you’d like), draw out areas and collaborate to map out great food, awesome photography spots or whatever strikes you. If one of you already has something mocked up in Google Earth or their own My Map, you can start by importing a KML or GeoRSS file. Chalk up another useful addition to what was already a great tool for making personalised maps.
[via Google Operating System]Buzzword, the online word processor acquired by Adobe earlier this month, is now open for a public “preview.” There isn’t a wealth of features not available in Google Docs or Zoho, but there are a few noticeable differences. The most obvious is the minimalist, Flash-based interface that swings toolbar menus around as you select them. The fonts are also unique—Buzzword uses seven smoothed-out Adobe varieties that venture outside the standard set. The webapp offers all the document saving/printing/sharing features of its brethren, but adds a commenting system for shared documents. Buzzword requires a free sign-up to use.
Buzzword [via Download Squad]Event organizer webapp Fasterplan creates collaborative “billboards” that help users hammer out the details of an upcoming event. Set up a Fasterplan billboard for your event and drag and drop widgets onto it—like polls (“Where should we eat afterwards?”), date finders (“When’s good for you?”), images, and text notes. Get your event billboard’s permalink and email it out to all your friends to answer the polls and plan your get-together. Check out a sample billboard to see Fasterplan in action.
fasterplanInstantly share files, notes, and photos with Stixy, an online bulletin board web application. An information manager at its core, Stixy gives you plenty of control over tasks, appointments, photos, notes, and bookmarks, and you can share your bulletin board with family and friends. There is no limitation on the size of a workspace but each file is capped at 10MB. Also, for now, there’s no way to view many files (PDFs, DOCs, videos) without downloading them locally—but hopefully they’ll implement functionality to support accessing these files server-side. However, for collaboration, Stixy makes it easy to share many files and store files online.
Stixy
