During his keynote today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new Facebook app from Microsoft called Docs, which lets Microsoft Office documents be shared with Facebook friends.
The app was created by Microsoft’s Fuse Labs. "It’s been quite a sprint for the FUSE team to deliver this beta – from concept to its initial implementation in less than four months," says says Fuse in its announcement. "The FUSE Labs mission is to explore a range of ‘Future Social Experiences’. In this exploration it’s our belief that we may increase the value of Office ‘docs’ by giving everyone the ability to seamlessly take their friends and connections with them from Facebook to docs.com."
"The fact that we’ve been able to adapt the Office 2010 "Web Apps" technology to work directly with Facebook truly speaks to the flexibility and power not just of the Facebook platform, but also of the Office system’s rich "contextual collaboration" capabilities," the company adds. "And we’d never have been able to achieve our critical ‘simplicity’ goals had it not been for our ability to use a new test feature from Facebook that allows us to build an instantly personalized and seamless document authorization & sharing experience directly from our site."
Documents can be created directly within the app, or can be uploaded from your computer. Facebook friends can then collaborate on it if you share it with them. – you can select those you want to share it with or share it with all your friends. You can also make it public for everyone to see.
Documents can be viewed and edited directly within the web browser, but if you have Microsoft Office software, you can edit them "more richly" through there.