Yes! Collaborative document editing is one of the all-time killer apps.

I rank collaborative document editing as one of the all-time ground-shaking, ultimate killer apps for electronic information appliances, up there with the word-processor, spreadsheet, and e-mail.

But up till now it has been lagging way behind. But that simply can no longer be given that most people use multiple devices: a computer at work, a laptop at home, possibly a phone or tablet.

If you want to be able to have a document or documents open across these devices so that an edit with one will show up on all the others, you need collaborative editing. Now it is announced that OwnCloud has released a major new feature which allows collaborative editing of OpenDocument Format (ODF) documents.

There are other things in the collaborative domain which still have not gotten there: for example, there needs to be a way to set up collaborative web-browsing across multiple browsers on different devices. What comes closest to this is the app Xmarks. While Xmarks will open a new tab if one is opened in any of the collaborating browsers, its major flaw – and I believe this is a critical one – is that it will not also close tabs.

So if you are one one system and you open a new tab in a browser, it will open the new tab on the other collaborating browsers, yet if a tab is closed on any of them, for some odd, inexplicable reason it will not equally close on all the other browsers.

One other area at least in the non-Mac world that needs major help is collaborative contact lists. Even though I’m now running my own CardDAV server, its still a pain to get my contacts to sync right – mostly because there are issues with Android trying to force Google Contacts on us and also because Google Voice only works with Google Contacts (which is totally lame). There should be a law which forces companies to de-couple contact management from other apps.