Imagine writing a blog post, this very one even, and wanting a friend’s feedback. Usually, unless your friend had access to your CMS or you had a Google Sites setup, this would be hassle to do casually — unless you sent them the text in Skype or iChat. Obviously I’ve done this before.
Task.fm founder Anthony Feint has created Pen.io (and yes, it’s an interesting choice of name) for this and sundry other situations, like when you want to share a recipe or don’t want to give a freelancer access to your CMS backend (that’s what she said) but need to collaboratively edit a draft. Similar to Wix.com, Jottit and Publ.ca, Pen.io allows you to publish, share and edit a page, without creating an account.
All you need to do to create a page on Pen.io is choose a name for the page and include a password for editing. You’re then presented with a URL which you can give to your friends with a password for collaborative editing. The more advanced among you could include a video by using the “video” tag and add in another page by using “page” tag.
Said Feint:
“The big difference with Pen.io is that the focus is solely on the content. With this app I’ve focused on speed and simplicity. There are no user accounts, no complex editors and the end result is a beautiful, standards based page.”
Feint says his future plans include building the ability to drag and drop any .doc .pdf or .txt file onto the home page in order to create a document as well as creating an API, with the over all goal of making online publishing as simple as possible.