After I recently blogged about Zoho Writer, Arvind, who has a company blog he contributes to and works on the Zoho apps, emailed me personally to firsthand answer my queries! HOLY MOLY!

I'd like to mention three things here:

• I can't overstate how joyed I am to get this correspondence. This kind of touch is exactly what more tech companies should have, regardless of specialty. I understand, yes, busy people can't respond to all their email, but even getting back to some—especially if it's on an external blog and wasn't sent in directly—is really warm and sends more good vibrations than 100 clones of Brian Wilson in a marching band on a midspring's dusk.

• I had no clue a whole suite of Zoho apps existed. Leave it up to me to miss the obvious, but you can sure as heck bet I am gonna check them out now, thanx to Arvind's own encouragement.

• This reminds me of my own experiences when a Resident of Second Life phrases a question, not expecting me to answer. (I'm referred to in the third person an odd number of times, even when I'm actively nearby!) It gets easy to forget the power of a "hello!", and even moreso, the followup conversation from thereonupwards—but this proves it.
  

The fourth thing, which is superfluous, as I will ask personally, is: "How the heck did Arvind find me?"

BTW, I edited this blog entry primarily in Zoho Writer. Some benefits I've noticed:

• blog-city's own editor can't resize the editor vertically, making it a PITA to get an easy view of long documents.
   
  
• Zoho Writer's speed feels much more responsive (AJAX?). For example, when I click the "link" toolbar button to insert a hyperlink, blog-city's editor crawls badly, taking 5 seconds to load. May not seem like much by itself, but multiply that by many times!
   
  
• Zoho's autosave and document history are WONDERFUL. No need to save multiple copies if you want to "bounce back"—just use the history view to copy-'n'-paste something out of the past, and you're GOOD.

There are some quirks: Zoho Writer's Find doesn't work Firefox 1.5 'cuz of a bug; copying and pasting from Zoho to blog-city leaves some weird-looking formatting I have to tweak afterwards; and I wish the collaborative editing was more realtime… and I'm hopeful for the future.

In any case, thank you Arvind—you've made a positive difference and I appreciate your friendliness!