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Google Plus got a bunch of new features today, many of them involving Hangouts, the video chat feature. This is not the only social network with video chat in town, but Hangouts always had some stand-out features. First of all, they can be public, so anyone can see one in their stream and join in, which is a very honest interpretation of the word "social." They also support two-way chat for up to 10 people, which can be chaotic, but often in a fun way.

Today's update brought Hangouts to mobile devices, and it added "On Air" mode to allow users to broadcast to the public (once On Air opens to everyone, that is). All these features sound like fun. But the killer app on Google Plus is more about work than play. Google Docs is now available live over Hangouts, making live, face-to-face collaboration possible on the Web for free.

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has joined forces with crowdsourcing document outfit Scripto , open source document transcription tool, to transcribe and share a piece of U.S. history thought to be lost.

The project "Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800" seeks to transcribe and digitize copies of papers from a formative part of American history, previously thought to be lost to fire. Projects like these rarely suffer from a surfeit of funding, so using Scripto to coordinate a crowdsourced transcription has made the project possible.

Today, Yad Vashem and Google have begun an ambitious project to digitize the Holocaust museum's extensive collection of materials.

Starting today, a user can directly access over 130,000 full-resolution photographs from Yad Vashem's photo collection via the Google search page. Google has implemented experimental optical character recognition technology for the project. OCR, it is hoped, will make photographs and other documents lacking in metadata easier to find by search in different languages.

The New York Times' new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it's an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer.

With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader's fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer's ability to annotate a story with "raw" information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer's code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah.

CompareMyDocs makes it easy to compare multiple revisions of a document and to compile a final version based on these revisions. The site, which launched today, can handle Word documents and rich-text files. You simply select up to seven documents and the service will display all the differences between these in a very well-designed interface. CompareMyDocs is available free of charge.

Two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha, a former Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server strategist, and Alex DeNeui, also a SQL strategist, are attempting to do what (so far) Microsoft has not: compete head-on with Google Docs by transforming Microsoft Office into online collaboration suite. To do so, they've launched a company called DocVerse, an early-stage startup that aims to simply document sharing and collaboration.

Box.net, the popular document hosting and sharing service, announced a major redesign of its user interface today, which also puts a lot more emphasis on social features like profiles and activity streams. The new version of Box.net also focuses on collaboration and effectively turns Box.net into a social network for small to medium-sized businesses and groups.

EtherPad is not likely to win a prize for its user interface design, but it may just be one of the most useful web apps we have seen in quite a while. EtherPad allows you to instantly create a workspace for text documents that you can then share with your colleagues, clients, or friends. Every edit to the document will immediately appear on your co-workers' screens in real-time.

EtherPad acknowledges that Google Docs already allows for a similar kind of collaboration, but compared to EtherPad, Google Docs is clunky and slow when you just want to collaborate on a simple text document.