Hackpad
avc.com
avc.com
Google Docs has never felt webby to me. It feels like a big Flash or ActiveX component, as it's mostly aiming to emulate 1990s desktop software, with menu-bar and all. So it carries considerable UI baggage and is not a clean web app with a DOM that could be effectively inspected or manipulated.
For real-time collaboration, I much prefer Etherpad-type tools as they're lightweight. For private one-off docs, I find secret Gists much simpler to deal with.
For dealing with less-tech-literate people, Google Docs is nice because they instantly recognize and understand it (and they can see me collaborating at the same time and I don't need to explain anything).
It's a tool I make that's geared around collaboratively editing and running code in the browser.
Needs to work reliably before I'll consider even a free trial. I could see myself paying money for something like this - so I suggest they fix these issues :-)
"an aggressively enterprising person; a go-getter."
Hope this helps.
We've also experimented with using public hackpads for some core framework design discussions once or twice. It feels like a promising option. I hope we can try more of this.
One of the most valuable tools in our kit.
I just think Google bungled the beta process, trying to treat it like GMail when the same beta model isn't gonna work for anything but e-mail or XMPP.
However, I'm definitely going to recommend this product to my team, as right now we're using Github wikis, which is fine for us developers, but for real business use(as in, the rest of the team), this could be just so much better.
disclaimer: I love Google Wave
EtherPad was really cool as well - its functionality has been absorbed in Google Docs and elsewhere.
Today a key devops workflow I see on a daily basis is team-based HipChat rooms with deploy / alert notifictions and links to GoogleDocs, especially spreadsheets.
Which somewhat duplicates Goggle Wave - at least how I remember it.
He has been posting links to hackpads for a while and I noted the marked absence of any disclaimers.
As for conflicts of interest, I prefer to assume everyone has a conflict :) I follow ZH here: http://www.zerohedge.com/node/13972
> The reality is, critical readers should read analytic posts and the rest of [the internet] with the blanket assumption that the author is totally "conflicted." ... This turns the conversation to the content, and away from the author, the author's biography and the contents of their IRA account / blind trust. This (the content) is, of course, where the focus should be.
However - I end up using the google doc spreadsheet more than the doc to informally sketch up projects and share information.
It would be great to have that option.
But fundamentally it is a difference of design intent. Hackpad is not a replacement for a word processor. It is not designed for cosmetically designing papers or reports. Hackpad has been designed from the ground up for collaboration on ideas and for living documents (which evolve over time). It's in use in a number of leading tech companies (airbnb, stripe, upworthy) as well as on the open web.