Google Presentations is Go

Back in April, I posted about Google Docs and Spreadsheets, where I noted that Google acquired Tonic Systems, creators of online presentation software.  Well, here we are 5 months later, and Google Presentations is go.  Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been renamed to just plain Google Docs, and has gotten a facelift - and now, you can create Presentations online as well.

It’s pretty slick.  It’s AJAX, not flash or Java, which is great.  It does all the basic presentation stuff - creating bullets and titles, changing looks, moving things around.  The best thing is the same best thing about the text editor and the spreadsheets application - collaboration.  If you share your presentation, multiple people can work on it at once.  The second best thing?  Being able to publish your presentation to a webpage - which also automatically creates a chat box.  You can even embed your presentation in an iFrame.
Overall, it’s a neat application.  Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problems that the rest of the Google Docs suite does - pages being slow to load, disconnects, automatic saving when you don’t want it, occasional sluggishness, etc.

Personally, I don’t know that we’re ready for online office application suites.  While they are definitely nifty, especially for creating quick documents for web publication or simple collaborative work, ultimately they simply are not as robust as desktop applications - and given the sad state of the United States’ broadband infrastructure, I don’t know that it will become of significant use within the next few years.

Still, fun to play with.

For a more complete rundown of Presentation’s features and glitches, Philipp Lenssen has a great post about it over at Google Blogoscoped.