Google said Thursday that it has snapped up Writely, a maker of a Web-based word processor. Writely does what Word does but uses a web browser rather than an application residing on your desktop. A user creates a free account on Writely.com, starts a new document, then starts writing. Most common editing tools are available, such as bold, italics, underline, colors, background colors, strikeout, superscript, subscript (enough fun with Writely already), justifications, bullets, and spell check. Here's where it gets more interesting:

1. You can access your Writely documents from any computer. Forget about dragging a computer with you. As long as there will be where where you're going to be, just log in to Writely to access your work from there. This also means you don't have to running over your laptop and losing all of your valuable work. It's stored securely on Writely's (now Google's) servers.

2. You can collaborate with others on document in real time. More than one person can work on the exact same document at the exact same time. This can be particularly useful for editing documents.

3. Writely generates relatively clean HTML. Have you ever tried to publish a Word document as HTML? It usually turns into a mess and generates a TON of additional code. Writely's code is fairly clean, making it a good choice for bloggers to draft their posts. It sure beats writing in the tiny form boxes in the administrative side of most blogs.

4. Writely Stores Version Histories. Wouldn't it be nice if you could roll back your document to an earlier version before your mind started to fail you? Writely automatically saves versions of your document on the fly, making it easy to browser through snapshots of earlier versions and revert to earlier versions with a few clicks. This also makes it easy to roll back changes made by other collaborators who thought they were being helpful, but weren't really. Color coded revisions by author and time make it easy to figure out what went wrong.

5. Blog Integration: Writely integrates with many popular blogging platforms, including TypePad and Blogger. Bloggers can write and publish directly from Writely, skipping the need to log in to their blog directly.

6. Save from Web: So, what happens when you want to print or email a Writely document to someone? Writely documents are currently exportable to HTML, RTF, Word, OpenOffice, and PDF. They can also be printed directly from Writely without the extra date and URL headers and footers normally associated with printed web pages.