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EtherPad: Dead Simple Real Time Collaboration
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This Link is located in the Public Channel ReadWriteWeb Tech Blogs.
Posted by MyPropsMonkey 50 days ago (feedproxy.google.com). Views: 5
Tags: web technology |
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EtherPad is not likely to win a price for its user interface design, but it might just be one of the most useful web apps we have seen in quite a while. EtherPad allows you to instantly create a workspace for text documents that you can then share with your colleagues, clients, or friends. Every edit to the document will immediately appear on your collaborators' screens in real-time.
EtherPad acknowledges that Google Docs already allows for a similar kind of collaboration, but compared to EtherPad, Google Docs is clunky and slow when you just want to collaborate on a simple text document.
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No-Sign Up
EtherPad, for example, doesn't require you to sign-up before you can start working on your document. Indeed, you can't even sign up for the service, which might become a bit of a problem when you want to go back to a document you worked on earlier, but don't remember the randomly assigned URL.
You can also just share your workspace's URL with your co-workers and they, too, don't have to sign up. Google Docs requires you to send email invitation to all your collaborators and updates to documents don't appear in real-time.
EtherPad would be a great tool if you want to keep collaborative notes during a conference call or meeting, but you could also use it to draft or edit text for a press release or email collaboratively.
Features
EtherPad also has a versioning system that allows you, or anybody else with access to your workspace, to save the document at any time.
Developers who want to share code might also find this a useful tool, as it can highlight JavaScript syntax. Looking at EtherPad's heritage, it becomes clear why the developers added this feature. The service was developed by AppJet, an online web programming platform, and is basically a showcase for the next version of AppJet's tools, but was mainly created because the developers at AppJet were looking for a tool that had EtherPad's functionality but weren't able to find one.
Verdict
As is often the case, the most useful tools are those that have a relatively restricted feature set, but allow users the freedom to use them as they see fit. EtherPad is one of these sercices and it will probably become a standard tools for us very soon.
You can find a screencast of the product here, but given that you don't have to sign up for it, you could just as well try it out for yourself (or join this workspace we already created).
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