I sign up for a lot of private betas when they are first announced and usually just forget about them until one day an email arrives saying the time has finally come for me to join the small in-crowd that gets to play with the latest online toy. That happened a couple of days ago with TypeRoom.
The premise of TypeRoom is that you can edit any website through a browser-based, WYSIWYG, HTML-free interface. To be able to play with any site, you don’t need to have any relationship to it whatsover. However, I’ve just tried editing the CNN and Patriots websites to say something amusing about the Giants’ win but the CNN website never actually came up for editing and on the Patriots site it was clear that you couldn’t put new text boxes in, only edit existing ones. So there are some limitations. But in my circumstances - where I have created several websites using Dreamweaver but not have a work laptop I can’t install my own software on - it’s perfect for the odd tweak here and there. You can set up FTP options or you can use the site to send an email with the HTML file attached to your webmaster (pity those poor webmasters who are now going to get emails from every Tom, Dick and Harry who figures out how to use the site with “helpful” suggestions for improvements).
At this point, it’s a great beta, but it will probably need quite a few improvements to really be useful to anything but the most basic users.
