Etherpad gets a makeover and becomes even more of a threat to Google Docs | Hacker News Reader

Etherpad gets a makeover and becomes even more of a threat to Google Docs

techcrunch.com

67 pointsmrduncan24 comments

I haven't used Etherpad, but isn't Google Wave going to capture the essential feature of Etherpad (N-way realtime collaboration) while being federated, backed by Google, and open source to boot?

I know that there is still room to be a niche player in a market even after someone dominates a space, but I am curious to hear if the AppJet folks have any more ambitious plans for dealing with this.

Trying to do one thing -- text editing - really really well is probably a good defense to Google Wave.

Etherpad could, in theory, write their app as an app for Google Wave, but Google Wave itself isn't going to provide the Etherpad experience.

Not only that, but Wave is going to change life as we know it! Cure disease! Stop war! Prolong life! I can hardly wait!

As soon as it's stable enough to be released!

We use etherpad for allowing candidates to write code during phone interviews. We love it, and would never go back to using Google Docs for this (what we use to do before, and what I did when I was at Google).

Looks like it has a lot of potential. I wouldn't be scared of google wave, the wave server could easily be a backend for this. Let's see how it scales, join my pad http://etherpad.com/Lrg64lFCKU

Nice, I have found EtherPad to be really fast, and if it remains that way I think that's a pretty good advantage.

Does anyone know if this new interface is utilizing any JavaScript front-end library? I'll assume safely the answer is no, since each public pad instance (http://etherpad.com/qT6VIf0T1j) also generates a css file (http://etherpad.com/static/compressed/031904e16a8466d1d48452... ~2000 lines) and a js file (http://etherpad.com/static/compressed/d0537b549791338e55ba31... ~8000 lines), not to mention the developers founding this venture are ex-Googlers and probably preferred defining the front-end from scratch.

If you're in for a trip, copy and paste the JavaScript into a beautifer (http://jsbeautifier.org/) then clear your mind because it's gonna get blown.

I find it strange that TechCrunch mentions Google as a competitor but not SubEthaEdit, which is clearly what inspired Etherpad in the first place.

SubEthaEdit is Mac-only software, which sort of rules it out as a competitor.

I wish there was a standard protocol for collaborative text editing, so that SubEthaEdit and Etherpad (for instance) could talk to one another. (Google Wave doesn't count, since it's trying to do much more than text editing.)

Perhaps a well-defined subset of Wave? Wave is to EtherTextEditProtocol as XML is to Atom?

I miss the syntax highlighting option... hopefully that will come back.

(Another day, another hundred apples-and-oranges link-baiting comparisons.)

Mind, Etherpad is great for what it does - real-time collaborative, persistent plain-text editing on the web.

I see several YC startups in Google's collision path and for some time I have wondered if the advice of not competing with Google in things they are good at is valid.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/02/an-interview-with-vc-pa...

My opinion is that it never was valid: most startups at the list bellow were doing things Googlers are good at and they got adcquired, and those startups' ideas weren't so wild (according with the second advice in that interview).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

Everyone now and then you find one of those products that makes you go "woahw". Etherpad is one of them.

But TechCrunch pegging them against Google Docs is just not nice for the AppJet guys. Instead of emphasizing Etherpad's selling points, they're made to look like ex-employees out for revenge; neither the screenshot nor their numbers in raised capital make them seem ready for any "fight".

Instead of emphasizing Etherpad's selling points

Meh, that's the nature of the press. One day they're doing fluff pieces for FasterWeb and the next they decide to pit an unsophisticated web app against Google.

During my software engineer internship interview with Google they wanted me to write code using Google Docs, but the interviewer couldn't even get it to work properly (what a great way to impress candidates). Here's to Etherpad showing them how to get it done :-).

I've found recently that a nice option for emacs users to get 99.9% of the same functionality is to have two (or more) users ssh into a server, share gnu screen sessions, and start emacs 23 + emacsclient. Everyone has full access to their own emacs, but share buffers with everyone else. You can simultaneously edit the same buffers, etc.

I know this isn't the niche that etherpad is aiming for, but there are a number of groups dispersed looking for this kind of functionality. For team coding while separate, this plus ichat provides a very compelling experience.

You can actually open a new emacs window in a different screen. So the cool use is to have someone login to their machine on their laptop, open emacs, then have them spawn a new window in the running X server.

Yay emacs.

Are there any collaborative text editing plugins for vim?

Or, I guess more generally, are there any collaborative text editing servers for which vim has a plugin available?

Considering how emacs is very old (lots of person decades of development), is focused on niche/advanced text editing, and is built around one of the most praised languages, it's interesting that it doesn't have this.

SubEthaEdit's use of bonjour to fing other computers on the LAN running it is a great advantage. Heck, even MS OneNote has a collaborative edit feature if you give the hostbnames/IPs.

Has anyone done pair programming with one of these kind of tools? That might be pretty bad ass. Or it might be terrible. I'm not sure.

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