After what seems like ages it appears that a few developers in the Web Applications world are starting to get creative with user interfaces. I say this because I was recently briefed by Lunarr of its eponymous service, currently in controlled beta release.

Lunarr is a collaboration service and its cleverness lies in both the metaphor it employs and the way it is implemented. The concept of Lunarr is that Web pages have a “front,” the regular rendered page you see when you load a URL, and a “back,” data that is attached to the “other side” of the page that is used to route the content to your collaborators and track comments and changes.

Lunarr is the creation of a Japanese entrepreneur, Toru Takasuka, who was responsible for Japan’s most successful groupware product, Cybozu, which outsold Microsoft and Lotus in Japan. With Lunarr Takasuka intends to create a global groupware platform.

When you log in to Lunarr you are presented with a blank page with a menu bar across the bottom and a dog ear at the top right. Using the menu you can upload a file to the page, import a Web page, or create a page from a template.

The templates are all for WYSIWYG word processing and the layouts include a blank document, a pro and con debate layout, a question and answer sheet, as well as a plan, a specification sheet, and a report. In the current beta there are also “slots” in the template menu for other applications so presumably we’ll see things like spreadsheet and database functionality.

The menu also provides access to “actions,” which include going to your inbox; contact list; Lunarr account settings; dashboard (which just shows the Lunarr features you’ve used – I’m not sure what the value of this is); a facility to invite other people to use Lunarr (a clever marketing tool – in the beta period you get 50 invites); and logout. The menu also provides a link to create a new blank document.

Flip the page by clicking on the dog ear and you are presented with the back of the page where you can add a comment and enter the addresses of recipients. You can also create multiple messages allowing you to customize your text for each recipient or groups of recipients.

When a Lunarr document is sent or changed an e-mail message is sent to notify the collaborators. Currently, these notifications are rather cryptic - hopefully future releases will make them more useful. An RSS feed for tracking document changes is planned for a future release.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.