Ok, I was thinking about how annoying it is that I do work on word documents at home, go to work and realize I forgot to email the new document or bring it on my USB drive.

Now as far as I know there is nothing like this idea available right now, but I could be wrong because I just thought of it seconds ago, and the big selling point would be that it would be free (so there is probably some high priced software to do this).

The idea is to create a plugin (for whatever software, but I'm thinking MS Word or the whole of office) that would interface with gmail, possibly using the gmail drive software or something similar. Anyways, the final goal would be to back up changes to a document automatically to gmail (or any email service that has similar capabilities), and would also automatically update a document when opened based on changes saved in the email drive.

The optimal idea would be to make it so that it would be able to use the track changes feature in word to store changes, as well as to incorporate changes. That way no matter where you are, if you are connected to the internet you would always be working on the most update version of your document.

I can't program this, and I assume the track changes thing would require changes to MS Word or whatever to work, but think about how convenient it would be. Also, if you only keep track of changes you wouldn't have to upload/download as much data probably, and it could be done very frequently if done right.

If this is really a unique idea, and you would be interested in giving it a shot, let me know how it turns out.
I'd also be interested in knowing what people think about this idea, and any suggestions people may have.
Just because it is a LQ.org forum...this could be done for openoffice or something as well.

i'd like to see them start an online word processor, like they did with the spreadsheets...

how about this?

http://www.thinkfree.com/common/main.tfo

yeah, i've seen that, and several others... they look pretty cool... but it's much more convenient to have one that's integrated with your gmail account... i'm pretty sure google will do it, though... i dare say the spreadsheets was just the tip of the iceberg...

The problem with Word is the proprietary format they use to save their document. But Open Office would be a possible candidate.
Track changes can be done using a version control system, such as CVS subversion etc.