Textflow is an online tool to help people manage comments and changes to documents from other people. The product has not yet been released, but is in development from a company in Sweden. Their website has a video demonstration of the product in action. From their FAQ and screenshots it appears that the product is written with Adobe Flex.

Here's a description of the technology, from their site:

To make parallel word processing possible, we have developed WeaveSync – a new technology to index, match and synchronize documents and other sequential file data (patents pending). WeaveSync replaces the single document with hundreds or thousands of database elements: paragraphs, sentences and words. By comparative pattern recognition and statistics, WeaveSync analyzes the new version(s), finds changes from your version and pairs them with your source text. If content has moved, WeaveSync traces the move. Whatever changes in your colleagues’ document versions, WeaveSync connects it to the original. No version heaps, no mailed descriptions, no manual coordination work.

Today Buzzword was updated to version "Preview 7", with a few new features including colours support for tables, text highlighter (very useful for commenting and reviewing!), information on shared documents (such as who's opened them), support for importing documents from Microsoft Word 2007 and exporting to plain text and HTML.

I've recently been using Buzzword for creating documents (like my weekly status report) and I'm loving it. I love the simplicity of it and the fact that I can get my documents from anywhere.

The online word processing market got more interesting today when Adobe announced their intention of purchasing Virtual Ubiquity, the company that created Buzzword, an online Flex based word processor. Buzzword is currently available in a public beta: you can sign up today and see what its like today.

I've been using Buzzword for a few months now, and I have to say that its probably the best online word processor that I've seen. It is the only online word processor that I know of that does proper pagination, so the documents on the screen look exactly like they do when they print.

Adobe says they plan to incorporate the functionality into future versions of Adobe Connect, Create PDF Online and the Adobe Document Center.

Robert Scoble has more insight on what this means for Microsoft's near monopoly with Microsoft Office, as does Josh Catone at Read Write Web.

Microsoft countered today's announcement with the unveiling of Office Live Workspace. I haven't been able to test that out, but Mary Jo Foley has more information on Microsoft's announcement.