June 25th, 2006
Google moving data from Writely?
Today Google is performing "maintenance" to Writely that will be finished sometime this afternoon. All your documents remain read-only during this period — which got me thinking.
They obviously didn’t take down their servers to do hardware or OS upgrades, otherwise nothing would be available — it has to be related to moving data. The reason they would lock the files and keep them read-only would be to keep everything in sync.
Where would they be moving data? Well, since it’s now a Google product — I am thinking there is a good possibility it is being transferred to Google servers to populate a similar service to Spreadsheets.
Is there any evidence this might be what is happening? Yes there is. The URL for this service will probably not be www.writely.com — Google likes to make the URL of their services relatively consistent. Because we know it will probably be <something>.google.com, I started digging around to see what I could find.
Currently, writely.google.com doesn’t translate to anything, but after several attempts, I found a new DNS record writely.l.google.com that redirects to Google’s main page. Usually this is how Google rolls things out — for example, spreadsheets.google.com’s CNAME record points to spreadsheets.l.google.com.
Of course they could be simply performing maintenance to Writely, but I hope not.
Garett Rogers 
is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Googling Google via Email alerts or RSS.
