5 Dec
2009
5 Dec
'09
11:17 p.m.
Seems like there's a lot of overlap between Wave and things i've heard
talked about as Xwiki's post-2.0 plans... google seems to be putting some
additional weight behind Wave, or eliminating competitors:
AppJet announced the Google
acquisition<http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/google-acquires-appjet>…Friday.
"The EtherPad team will continue its work on
real-time collaboration by
joining the Google Wave team," the site said.
AppJet offered free and premium versions of its service, which could import
Microsoft Word documents, Web pages, PDFs, and plain
text files, and let
groups of people edit them collectively on what it called pad. A
"time-slider" feature let people look back at earlier incarnations of a pad.
Google Wave has similarities. It's a sort of hybrid between instant
messaging, wikis, and e-mail. Google Chief Executive
Eric Schmidt sees
Google Wave as the future of collaboration</8301-30685_3-10380917-264.html>,
in particular given its intrinsically networked nature and its real-time
view of what collaborating people are up to.
That real-time collaboration is a thorny problem. It can be difficult to
permit multiple people permission to edit the same
document at the same time
while ensuring one person's changes don't interfere with another's work. And
showing simultaneous work complicates a service's user interface, too.
Google Docs--the online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation
services--also offers some simultaneous editing
abilities. AppJet dings it
in its EtherPad FAQ <http://etherpad.com/ep/about/faq>.
"With Google Docs it takes about 5 to 15 seconds for a change to make its
way from your keyboard to other people's
screens," the site said. "Imagine
if whiteboards or telephones had this kind of delay!"
Google Wave and Google Docs are perhaps the closest rivals to AppJet, but in
the big picture, the rivalry is between cloud
computing and the way most
people use productivity software today, on their PCs. Notably, though,
Microsoft is working on an online version of its dominant Office suite.
Current EtherPad users should brace themselves for the end of the service:
"If you are a user of the Free Edition or
Professional Edition, you can
continue to use and edit your existing pads until March 31, 2010. No new
free public pads may be created. Your pads will no longer be accessible
after March 31, 2010, at which time your pads and any associated personally
identifiable information will be deleted," AppJet said.
That left one user, JavaScript programmer and jQuery project creator, John
Resig, unhappy.
"Super-lame that Etherpad is shutting down. We used it all the time for
jQuery planning," Resig said in a
tweet<http://twitter.com/jeresig/statuses/6347156410> on
Friday.