Source: Google Is Acquiring AppJet, The Company Behind EtherPad (YC S07) | Hacker News Reader

Source: Google Is Acquiring AppJet, The Company Behind EtherPad (YC S07)

techcrunch.com

40 pointsmikek11 comments

Oh no! My company totally depends on Etherpad to conduct phone screens. I'm not sure Google Wave is going to work as a replacement.

That said, congrats! Etherpad is an excellent product.

I wouldn't worry. The article says that EtherPad share's some features with Wave but the main interest in their technology might be the ability to operate behind firewalls(?). EtherPad's text editing features will probably (hopefully) get rolled into Google Doc's text editor.

A syntax highlighting Wave code editing app would be hot.

We looked into using Wave as the basis for http://squadedit.com. But we quickly realized to really use it effectively you needed a different Wave for each of say your model, view and controller. The mail like interface vs. something like tabs gets confusing pretty quick. You have to invite people each file or put then together and then pull them apart later. It's also a challenge to execute any of the code you're working on in a Wave. It's hosted but not in a development environment you can really access or control.

All that could maybe be done in an interface outside of a standard Wave client. But not being able to follow where someone is editing makes it hard to use for instruction or code review.

We ended up just creating a different kind of interaction that we think works a lot better for working with code.

That's awesome. I just checked out your app; it looks pretty bad ass. I have two points of criticism, and its only because I love what you have going:

1. Kill the ads; they make your product look like shit. Instead convince me that you have something ubber clean & simple that I should pay money for to upgrade. Etherpad did an amazing job at this. I'm also guessing you're not making much from the ads.

2. The "collaboration" link is kind of hidden in the corner. That's your killer feature, make collaboration first class. Consider sending me to https://squadedit.com/share/30ed2fbd instead of https://squadedit.com/free when I create a "pad".

3. Make a premium feature where I can hook this thing up to a .git repo and browse a folder structure (like I do in Textmate). I can't tell you have insanely valuable it would be for me and four other coders to have synced code views and tabs while we talk on Skype.

Good luck, I'll be rooting for anybody who can fill in the big shoes that Etherpad will be leaving behind.

Great suggestions.

1. The ads were too much for sure. When each ad was made it didn't seem too bad, but once all the dancing was on the page at once we knew it wasn't going to work. Unfortunately it was one of the last things we put in before launch (3 days ago). Given all the traffic, we've been focused on making sure everything stayed up an running. Today we put some temporary static ads up while we're redesign them.

2. Not a bad suggestion, but I like being able to bookmark the app. Long term we'd like to be more a competitor to desktop text editors. A bookmark directly to the app that isn't tied to only one share made sense to us, particularly in like a Fluid or Chrome OS type use case.

3. We definitely want to tie in with version control. The challenge is in doing it elegantly without forcing a particular VCS on someone. We've got some ideas on this we want to implement in the future.

Thanks for the feedback.

It seems this is a better (and confirmed) source: http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/google-acquires-appjet