Adobe has really been pushing online services lately.  We had the release of Photoshop Express and now the beta for Buzzword is now open for business.  When you think of online documents you think of Google Documents, but Buzzword is aiming to make its own presence known in the online word processing game.  Buzzword is also part of the Acrobat.com beta, which is a web-based suite of online services aimed at users who want to create and share documents on the web.

Buzzword is free to use, but you will have to signup for an Acrobat.com account, or you can use an existing Adobe account if you already have one.   I have been using it with both Safari and Firefox, and the loading of the interface and documents just seemed slow compared to similar services.  It has all the standard features you would expect to find in a word processor, and the interface is clean, although I personally didn’t find the dark background easy to work with.  Creating and editing documents was a snap, and it seemed to handle images and text placement well.  

Buzzword will allow you to save documents online in which you can access from other computers, or share with other users.  Sharing with other users is pretty simple, just click “share”, and enter the e-mail address for the users and assign them a role for the document.  The three roles available are “Co-author”, “reviewer”, and “reader”, which allows you to have total control over who views or edits the documents.  Perfect for collaboration with people from all over the globe.

If you don’t need to share online, then you also have the traditional option of saving the document to your local drive.  Buzzword will export to the typical document formats like Word, text files, HTML, Rich Text, and of course, Adobe .PDF.  The only issue with that is you only get a limited amount of .PDF creations per month, and after that you need to pay for more.  Update: I incorrectly stated that Buzzword is limited to 5 .PDF creations, there is no limit for Buzzword.

Since Buzzword is still in beta, I can’t give it a final recommendation, but as of now I don’t see Buzzword taking away users of current web-based services.  However, I do look forward to following the development and keeping you updated on it’s progress.  It’s free to use, so don’t hesitate to signup and give it a whirl.