Adobe Share

Adobe acquired Macromedia some time back, bringing Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat and others under the same roof. Clearly they were headed for a broader market. It seems that they’re about to enter the web app contest now, planting their flag on the same fields as Google, MSN, Zoho and the rest. What interests me most is their online word processor, Buzzword, recently acquired from Virtual Ubiquity; reports are that it’s heads, if not heads and shoulders, above the competition; but alas it’s what I call a transpiring beta and I’ve only just now sent in my email request for an account, with nothing leaking my way yet out of the system.

In the meantime, I’m playing with Adobe’s Share, a place where you can lodge files and either share them with the world or with only a select few. You can ship out email invites to your chosen few, publish the URL how you will, or, as I tried to do here, embed a preview in a website. I’ve uploaded a JPEG, showing certain Toronto Slawyers enjoying themselves at a recent wine and cheese, and a PDF, an article “Thinking Like a Lawyer” by Jane Gionfriddo. You may find that the preview doesn’t work — this is a beta, after all — but clicking on the image or using the menu provided will take you to Adobe Share and the documents themselves.

I have to say that apart from the Adobe “tall dark and handsome” approach to site design, where it’s all various greys and charcoal with the white hat type on top, I don’t see much here to recommend it over the storage/sharing competition. The embedding feature is nice, but would be better if it were proper Flash Paper, so that you could actually read the document online.