There is an interesting theme developing around the concept of documents and formats.

Since I left traditional banking, I have been consistently using OpenOffice.  Its not a purist or ‘software’ religion thing .. rather I shifted to Linux immediately because its a better, faster, smoother operating system, and OpenOffice is the best office suite for Linux.  The fact OpenOffice has not improved in 2 1/2 years is just a source of frustration.  I use MS Office and XP in a VM, when I have to interact with the rest of the world.

Anyhow, I digress.  Scribd has been distilling any document into a web format for some time, and even though the interface is annoying it does introduce a common web service layer that everyone can use in a browser.  Very Web 2.0.

Then today I see TwitDoc introduced on Techcrunch.  Twitdoc is a service that allows any document format to be shared over Twitter.  I care less about Twitter than the document sharing.  We are seeing glimmers of a movement towards a common document format.

In this case it is a format for sharing a view of a document.  Surely in time it must be include a method to edit documents too?  Yes we have this with Google Docs, Zoho, Zimbra, Office Live, but they are all discrete, with some commonality at a basic level of MS Office.

The concept of a common winner that anyone can edit and change from anywhere is enthralling.