Back in April, after unveiling their brand new cloud storage service Drive, Google launched a mini campaign called “Gone Google” (or “Go Google”) to promote some of their most popular products – Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. The point, I assume, is that switching over to all-Google products for your everyday productivity needs means that you’ve “Gone Google.”
Since then, Google has periodically dropped some fun little “ads” on YouTube, most of which highlight a feature of one of the aforementioned services in a quirky way. You may remember the one featuring Hall & Oates that showed the two working on the lyrics to “Maneater” using Google Docs. The point of that video was to showcase the collaboration feature, which allows multiple authors to work on the same document in real-time. We learned that collaboration in Google Docs was the only thing that made sure we sang “she’s a maneater” as opposed to “she’s a mangobbler” all these years.
Today, Google gives us a new way to think about Google Docs collaborations – one with a particularly literary twist:
Google Docs allow you to collaborate with anyone in real time. See what it’s like by joining up with some famous authors to create something worth sharing
If you head on over to the Docs Demo: Masters Edition, you’ll find a blank Google Doc already populated with six iconic collaborators – Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allen Poe. If you start typing, those authors may just join the party and either correct something you’ve already written, or add a little nugget of their own:
As you can see, Mr. Shakespeare changed my “you” to “thou,” and Mr. Nietzsche, well, added his own spice to Pulp Fiction dialogue.
Whether you buy into switching all of your productivity services over to Google, you have to admit that it’s a pretty clever demonstration of one of their most prominent features. Plus, who wouldn’t want the likes of Charles Dickens giving their writing that extra bit of…stuffiness?