This real-time coding environment could take social code to the next level

Social coding rarely means working on the same file at the same time. In order for work to proceed efficiently, there has to be some separation of work and responsibility.

I do think, however, that this will be great for code review and teaching. None of our developers are in the same place. We use Github and Gists to collaborate, escalating to a MeetingBurner session if we really need eyes on a conflict all at once. Those instances are infrequent, but on the business side, the sales and marketing teams use Google Docs to great effect when collaborating on their documents.

The ability to see someone else's cursor and watch their edits in real time is a major force multiplier. Documents reach a final stage much more quickly than they do with the old "track changes and email" approach. I can't help but see parallels in the dev team's approach, even with Git.

I can't help but be reminded of http://xkcd.com/927/ every time I see a new collaborative editor. Whether it's Cloud9, Google Collide, Collabedit or Space, one must sacrifice all the benefits of their current IDE in order to use this one. Wouldn't these sorts of projects make infinitely more sense as a plugin for an established text editor or IDE like Sublime or Visual Studio?

I'm not bullish on the idea of real-time collaborative coding. Maybe a simple CRUD app can handle that sort of thing, but anyone who's spent days debugging a corner case knows that the presence of someone else tends to just complicate the process. I agree with others that this could be great as a teaching/mentoring tool, or maybe an easier way to do code reviews. Just not seeing the point with collaborative coding.

It's funny - all these "real time code collaboration" editors that have been popping up lately remind me of a job at a research institute I had some 15 years ago. There we would sometimes do a `xhost -`, set the DISPLAY variable and just open a second Emacs frame on the remote machine. Of course that gives the other person pretty much full access to all your local files, but come on, we were all buddies there...

It's like P = x^n where n is how much a bit of code is pissing me off, n is how many people are working on it, and P is how much I am actually pissed off.

It seems apparent to me that Space's best use would be education of programming through pair programming. Or, imagine a lecture being taught with Space - each student watching the prof (and, of course, not deleting everything she types) code on their laptop rather than on a projector.

A reliable shared web code editor with syntax highlighting would be great for interviews. I've tried a few, but they crap out. Or the editors don't support the languages I care about, like Objective C. I've been living with Skype screencasts.

I don't understand social coding. If I'm working on file A and someone is working on file B. I want to compile the project and test the changes I just made to A, But someone happened to break file B, so the project won't compile. Then what?

While I don't really want this for coding, something like this for a music editor (DAW) would really be fantastic.

I have never encountered a scenario where I need to work on the same file, at the same time as somebody else.

That's what revision control is for. This looks like it was built by people who don't use a revision control system.

Oh my god, oh my god. Yes please. Please open source this. I'd love to be able to open a browser and have my workspace spring to life and I'd love to be able to pair program with two computers, keyboards, mice.