You have to sign up to a waiting list first.The title of the article embedded above should have (well, IMO) been ‘Dropbox invading Altassian Confluence’s territory’. So it’s unclear whether Google Docs users will switch to Paper to do something they can already do with Google Docs without the nice embeds. But then again, many Google Docs users already use the service to quickly draft something. It looks like a white board more than a document creation platform.

I called Paper a Google Docs competitor, even though it seems quite different with the smart embeds and mostly plain text approach. Some ProductHunt users could even use an early version of the product. It’s the result of the acquisition of HackPad. Our own Sarah Perez first reported the existence of Project Composer back in March. You can write todo lists, people in the document to notify them when you need someone else’s feedback and also leave comments next to a specific paragraph. It also does the same with other web content, such as YouTube videos, SoundCloud songs and more.

Paper will automatically change these links into images and videos. What if you want to add images and videos? You can browse your Dropbox and add a Dropbox link directly in the document. In some ways, this is reminiscent of Etherpad. If you want to format your document, you’ll have to use another word-processing app. Compared to Google Docs or Quip, it has very few rich-text editing features. Paper users can create a document and type text right away. It lets you edit a document in real time with your Dropbox contacts.

Dropbox Paper is a collaborative document editing platform in your browser.

Dropbox is going head-to-head against a very popular web app, Google Docs.

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