OK - making progress.
A little less fun than playing with pictures, but certainly useful! I set up accounts on both Google Docs and Zoho Writer, and did practice documents and spreadsheets on both. As a very experienced Microsoft Word and Excel user, I have to say they both seem to have a very similar, and comfortable, look and feel - Possibly even a bit simpler (not so many bells and whistles to worry about)- to the Microsoft products. Although I've shared documents in one way or other for collaboration most of my professional career, I'd never actually used a document sharing site and collaboration site like these (or, honestly, been aware that free web-based ones existed). All in all, I guess I'm not really convinced these are that much better than just e-mailing documents back and forth - except that you, as the owner, do seem to have better document/ version control than in Word/ Excel (You have to play with some settings in Word to protect a document).
As to how these could be used in a library- The first thing that comes to mind is that they are a free way for librarians - perhaps from different branches of a city's public library - to collaborate on a project. Although, again, I come back to "how exactly are these different from just exchanging by e-mail". I guess I'm not really sure. Then again, they are perfectly adequate substitutes for Word and Excel and Powerpoint, for example, for libraries to provide on their public-access computers - which would also permit these patrons to document-share at the same time. So there is value in that, too (both literally, and figuratively). Also, I think these types of resources are just good to know about as "being out there", so that you can educate your patrons about them should the need arise.
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