A couple of promising applications have been brought to my attention recently. Both are tied closely to the Web and have great collaboration potential. These applications are Writely and AllPeers.
Writely is an AJAX enabled web-browser based word processor. It has some very tidy formatting tools and supports the loading and saving of Microsoft Word compatable .doc files. Whilst its operating system neutral design is very encouraging what is even more interesting is its in built collaboration tools. As it is founded on the Web it has the inherit capability of allowing more than one person to actively edit a document at the same time without any security implications (try doing that in Microsoft Word). I only wish they provided a downloadable version of the software so that local versions of the applications could be used and developed upon.
Writely in action (click to enlarge)
The other interesting Web tool is AllPeers. It is an upcoming Firefox extension that (if the hype is to be believed) enables hassle free file sharing between Web users. AllPeers includes a BitTorrent client which in theory should greatly simplify the implementation of this promising software on a small scale. Serverless fire sharing is a very big unresolved issue on the Internet at the moment and hopefully if this application works as advertised and remains free it should make a big step in enabling simple file sharing without having to resort to email or web/ftp hosts.
A development screenshot of AllPeers (click to enlarge)