Collaboration Becomes Easier as WP.com Allows Sharing Google Docs

I have expressed my intense love affair with wordpress.com in several posts in this blog. Consider this one more added to that genre. Big whoop, I like these guys. They make my life easier.

So here is the deal: in their latest announcement, the WordPress Happiness Engineers have said that they are allowing the access to Google Docs and Calendar on wp.com blogs. Now since the Goog is ubiquitous and almost everyone uses it for working in their day to day lives, especially since a lot of us also use their email system, this is a rather welcome addition. From now on, embedding the G Docs and calendars is going to be a cinch now that the wp.com overlords have allowed us to use the iframe code snippet that the Google guys gave us.

This is fantastic news, especially considering the fact that a lot of us would resort to email sharing and link posting and a lot of other painstaking maneuvers in order to collaborate via a blog post. Now that becomes immensely easier. For example, now it will be a cake walk to dive in with sharing a doc as I am editing it and ask my readers for their opinion. When I am writing a collaborative paper or article, I can post it as a blog post and my partner(s) can do their part.

Since they will also allow embedding of spreadsheets and presentations, it would mean that all kinds of work that we usually do on the google docs could be just as easily accomplished here.

Anyways. The downside is that the doc has to be public, which sort of means that one has to password protect the post or something in order to maintain the secrecy of the doc (if one is into that kind of thing). And the Google User Name will be exposed: this might be a bit of an issue for anonymous bloggers who use their personal email IDs to keep clutter down.

Anyways. I welcome this feature and I think that this is going to put wordpress.com so far ahead in the race of becoming the premier blogging platform, that picking it up will be nothing but a reflex action.

So, what do you think: is it time for your blog to graduate to a collaborative platform as well?