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Comment by BobbyH | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for the Etherpad guys, who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015

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I still miss etherpad. I use some of the alternatives, but it's not the same :(

alternatives: http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html

Google docs is very similar to what etherpad used to be. All be it far less user friendly you can watch others edit and update in real time.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/albeit.html

Thanks for pointing that out.

Yes, you're right, but "albeit" is the word you're looking for, not "all be it".

http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=albeit&oldid=...

Interesting, but dictionary.com and m-w.com claim that it's a contraction of "al(though) be it".

  * http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/albeit
  * http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/albeit

It's a mandatory contraction. You can't correctly write "all be it", just like you can't correctly write "where as".

There's two main differences for me.

a) It takes some work to create a new Google doc and set it up for sharing. Etherpad was as simple as pasting the URL.

b) Etherpad shows changes from different users with a different background color. Google Docs is invisible.

Google Docs seems to support a very Etherpad-like interface, but it's a little too bloated for what I used to use Etherpad for.

A while ago Google Docs even switched to using Etherpad-style operational transformation instead of diff-match-patch. Some pretty mind-bending technology here:

http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applyi...

They released the code, host your own (I have a friend who does):

http://github.com/ether/pad/tarball/master

who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave

somehow i don't think they need your sympathies ... they probably got a decent amount of money from their acquisition, so they're probably not crying right now ;)

Can money replace seeing your vision for realtime collaboration die twice? I'm sure they're not hurting, but if they were building the technology because they believed it could transform the way we interact with each other for the better... Well, that still has to sting.

The Etherpad guys originally tried to build a platform (AppJet). Then etherpad took off, and they pivoted to building the company around that.

Not saying they wouldn't be a bit disappointed, just that their original version changed at least once and they seem to have dealt with that ok.

Can money replace seeing your vision for realtime collaboration die twice?

There is another way of looking at this. Let me rephrase that for you:

Isn't it nice that Google gave us all that money in order to let us try our idea a second time? Just look at all the lessons we learned in preparation for the third time. Google may even open-source all our work so we can take it with us.

They are probably working on something cool after wave. Maybe Google Me?

What's cooler:

1) a smallish hunk of cash

2) a thriving enterprise built around your vision for improving how people communicate

The Etherpad sellout was, and is, the most disappointing acquisition I can remember.

1) a smallish hunk of cash

i dunno how much they each got in the acquisition, but i doubt it was 'smallish'. it wasn't like they sold some artwork online for $30.

I agree and more sadly Wave in the form of Etherpad would have succeeded. A more de-centralized architecture with many Etherpad servers would have been perfect. Company related traffic wouldn't have left the LAN and of-site traffic would have been routed via federation protocol to other servers.

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