Google Presentations adds real-time collaboration

Google continues to compete with Zoho and SlideRocket for being the online presentations champion. Today Google rolled out completely new Google Presentations editor. It adds more than 60 new features, but the main one - is the ability to collaborate on a presentation in real-time. Everything is very similar to collaborative tools in Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets that appeared last year: in the right pane you can see who is currently working on the presentation, chat with them. And in the presentation view, you can see what objects the collaborators are currently editing (these object are highlighted with the corresponding colors). And with the help of Google+ Hangouts you can even video chat with colleagues while co-creating the presentation.

In addition to collaborative tools, the new version features lots of new effects for decorating presentations: slide transitions, animations, the ability to draw figures and charts in presentations, links between slides. The new impressive editor is fully built on HTML / Ajax, but the viewer is still working on flash.



And at the same time (while Google was rolling out the new presentations editor), Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco) said: "When it comes to applications in the cloud, most of the time we’re winning, winning, winning, winning at the expense of Google"

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