It’s easy to collaborate when the other person is sitting next to you. You can point to a specific sentence in a document, illustrate your idea through impromptu sketches, and write notes on the page margins. On the other hand, working with someone remotely is a different ball game. It can be challenging to get your point across via email, for example, sometimes resulting in lengthy back and forth exchanges. There’s definitely a need for better remote collaboration tools.

ShowDocument is a web application that tries to fill in this gap:

The service is free and requires no registration. By following the simple directions on the site’s home page, I was able to go live within seconds - easy and fuss-free. You can invite other people to join you in a session by sending them email or providing a code for that session. Once they’ve accepted, you can all talk via web chat on an embedded client on the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

Below the chat box is the Tool Box, containing a pen, a highlighter, an eraser, and a text tool, all of which you can use to write on top of your document, as if it was ordinary paper. All the people invited to the session can use this tool box. Here’s a screen shot of my (rather clumsy) first test to play around with it:

If you made a mistake, you can use the Undo button for incremental changes, Clear all of the marks on the screen in one click, or just the marks created by each tool. After you’re done, you may save the document, along with the notes drawn during the session, into a PDF file (from my trials, this worked flawlessly).

The current beta version of ShowDocument accepts .txt, .doc, .pdf, .ppt, .xls, and even image files like .jpg, and .gif. Aside from English, it also supports documents written in Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Arabic. If you’re worried about security, according to the site, documents are erased from their databases shortly after the sessions are terminated.

I can see this web app being useful in school projects, remote lawyer-client consultations, article editing, and a host of other situations. I, for one, am planning to use ShowDocument with some co-workers. Being free and having no need to register, it will be easy to get others to use this with you. Great idea, great execution.