Google Docs Shared Forms!
Ok… this is cool. The blogoweb is abuzz with talk of the new Google Docs feature that lets you build a form and have people fill it out such that their data gets automatically entered into a spreadsheet. I just tried it out and it could not be easier to do - you build a spreadsheet, add some titles across the top and click share, then you build the form (which is pretty much done for you) and voila.
After you fill that out, it gets entered into a row in the spreadsheet I created. Google Docs automatically added a “Timestamp” column that gets the time it was answered. And the spreadsheet, as far as I can tell, gets updated in real time - that is, I filled out the form, switched tabs back to the spreadsheet and the row was there, no fuss, no muss. I added the gadget to my iGoogle page (for some reason searching for the gadget didn’t show it - I needed to use that link directly) - and it shows you how many new responses you have. Pretty sweet.
I think that this is the clearly the right tactic for web applications to go, office apps in particular. In many ways they are not able to compete with desktop apps feature for feature. Javascript/Flash in a browser just is not robust enough to compete with a native desktop application. They can reasonably, though, get to the 70-80% mark which is what 90% of users need anyway - many simply don’t need all the bells and whistles that a native application gets you. But beyond that being a web app gives you the ability to do things that a desktop app can’t.
The first clear win in this case was sharing. Rather than emailing a file around and trying to always be looking at and working on the most recent copy, somehow, putting it on Docs and sharing it so that there’s only one copy and everyone’s using the same one, is a huge convenience. But now moving into functionality like this where you can take it’s onlineiness and build functionality around that - that’s a huge win over the desktop app. Whole business models, like SurveyMonkey.com are built around this idea. Sure SurveyMonkey offers you a lot more flexibility and power - but I can easily see Docs growing into that. And for people with simple surveying needs, this is an ideal solution. Super simple registration lists can be created this way. I think there’re a lot of applications that this makes easy.
I expect two things will come relatively soon - first increased customizeability of the page. Some kind of theming thing, or tie in with their Page Creator offering so that these pages can start looking nice. Second some sort of simple API so that I can actually start building forms and functionality on my servers that can send (and hopefully receive) data from these spreadsheets.
You actually already can - since this is just a form entry you can pull the right form names and put that form anywhere you want. What I’m talking about is adding some complexity to that, so if you want to make a multipage form that as a user travels through the pages each page updates the same row in the spreadsheet. A simple API to allow that would be pretty great.
All in all, this is a really strong case for Google Apps, I suspect it will start driving adoption as people use it to create these surveys because of it’s free and easiness and then stay as they realize Docs does pretty much everything they need anyway. Now go forth and create surveys!
