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Stypi (YC S11) Is Etherpad Reborn
- gammarator 15y agoFeel the collaboration! stypi.com/pi2o36wr
- DanielRibeiro 15y agoCool. I was looking into Cloud9 yesterday, but Stypi really does the rick, due to the syntax highlight and collaboration (cloud9 did not work for me), non signup required and ease of sharing (simple url). Great job guys!
- rafd 15y agoLooks like they're using Ace underneath too. (http://ace.ajax.org/ http://ace.ajax.org/)
- Mizza 15y agoNot to be a dick, but who cares? This just seems like a lame proprietary rip-off. Etherpad is alive and well, and it's totally F/OSS - Etherpad Lite was just released and it's SUPER easy to embed in your own apps: https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite
- spitfire 15y agoEasy, Because it's a YC company. and everyone knows Paul Graham farts unicorns. To get real for a minute. They may be able to make this into a nice money making niche product. There's plenty of open source products that people still pay money for. Just look at OSS content management systems.
- mechanical_fish 15y agoFrom the install docs for etherpad-lite on Github, step one: As root: Okay, two words and we've just lost 98% of the computer users in the world. Install all dependencies. We need the sqlite develob libraries, gzip, git, curl, wget, libssl develop libraries and python: ... and now we've lost most of the remaining 2%. "SUPER easy" for you, "SUPER easy" for me, but the other 99.98% of the potential customers would also love to use the product.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- decadentcactus 15y agoSeems to happen to a lot of products that are 'simple'. It happened to Dropbox ("Why would I use this when I can do these other twelve steps to do nowhere near the same thing") and the Ipod ("Why would I need this when I have a CD Burner and a Discman" (srsly)). I think it's safe to ignore claims like it :)
- rdl 15y agoTwo reasons to care: 1) This is a YC company after a couple months. They'll continue to refine the product; imagine if Facebook had gotten set in stone back in 2007, released code, and didn't themselves continue to develop. I love F/OSS for some things, but this isn't the kind of software which usually gets developed well entirely by the OSS community -- it's design/UI/UX heavy. Even if it were just a 100% clone today (which it isn't, it's better and worse in different ways), I'm excited what it will be in 6mo. 2) Social community and network effects are a whole lot more likely for this than for an embedded app. Again, standalone Facebook is way less interesting than facebook.com.
- citricsquid 15y agoright, so let's all praise it and talk about it in a few months when it's a good product :)
- mrkurt 15y agoEtherpad's well suited for editing human-speak documents, but not a good fit for collaborative code editing. This is more in the vein of SubEthaEdit on the web, in vim, and in other editors (I presume). This is going to be a friggin' boon for phone interviews.
- mark_l_watson 15y agoThanks for the link to Etherpad Lite - looks like a good project. That said, I set up Etherpad a long while ago for family and a few invited friends and installing it was fairly trivial. BTW, very roughly similar, but: Wave in a Box is also an easy install and I like the slightly simpler interface (compared to Wave itself).
- jacoblyles 15y agoLinux is an F/OSS Unix, but there was still room for Mac OSX. Some of us like nice things maintained by somebody else.
- sgrove 15y agoI'm super psyched about these guys - what they're working on has all kinds of potential that ether pad never had. It's one of the missing kinks in the modern development toolkit. I hope we'll get a chance to look into the API soon - I know they're working hard, but I don't want to be patient :) we have visions to fulfill!
- sbirch 15y agoYes! I want an API!
- mef 15y agoLooks like node + socket.io for the push updates. Very snappy.
- rorrr 15y agoSo their competitors are just Google docs PiratePad collabedit.com primarypad.com TypeWith.me Sync.in EtherPad Foundation iEtherPad.com titanpad.com etherpad.tugraz.at etherpad.mozilla.org:9000 sketchpad.cc okfnpad.org pad.telecomix.org twiddla.com ... Now the real question that I'd love to be be answered is - why would anybody fund this?
- tptacek 15y agoBecause if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list, the VC firm gets a stake in whatever Stypi decides to build with the huge number of users that implies? Not to put too fine a point on it, but, it's easy to see why you wouldn't invest in it: because you can't afford to put that much money behind a 1:10 or 1:15 risk. But that's exactly the problem every VC firm in the world has: finding the right set of 1:10 bets to put their money behind. I feel like, if you're going to complain about people funding stuff like this, you're really complaining about the whole VC model. And sure, I don't like it either. So go build a company without it. Plenty of us here have or are doing exactly that.
- jessedhillon 15y agoBecause if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list... The question is why do you or anyone else believe that this is a distinct possibility -- i.e. given this team, this product and this vision, why does someone with money believe that this represents a good bet? I agree with your assessment of the VC's challenge. However, VCs don't put money into every long bet that comes their way. The different between a 1:2 bet and a 1:10 bet is obvious -- distinguishing a 1:10 bet and a 1:10000 bet is where the art comes in. (That is distinguishing a long but feasible proposition from bullshit.)
- tptacek 15y agoSure. The point is just the naivete implied by being surprised that someone would invest in an Etherpad clone, as if anyone was likely to have simply invested in an Etherpad clone.
- gregwebs 15y agowhere is the vim plugin?
- ptman 15y agoI was wondering about the same thing.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sudonim 15y agoIm surprised they don't have markdown or textile in their list of languages.
- breck 15y agoI loved Etherpad and am excited to read this. Are you guys using Ace for the editor?
- anandkulkarni 15y agoLooking forward to trying this! There's a lot left to do in collaboration, and a commercially-backed piece of software will be able to achieve some remarkable things. Collaborative code editing, in particular, is really an unsolved problem, so I can't wait to see where this goes.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- vtail 15y agoFeature request: please add Objective-C to the list of supported languages. Thanks!
- endlessvoid94 15y agoThis is great. I'd love to see pair programming accomplished somehow with this (on the web, not via screen or buffer sharing). Can we integrate a compiler or static type checker into it?
- Eliezer 15y agoTo beat Etherpad and Google Docs: Let me hit ctrl-I while typing, type something and have it appear in italics, and then hit ctrl-I again to turn off italics. Likewise for bolding, though I use less of that. Let me apply URLs. Do this (while keeping it fast and without introducing any bugs worse than Google Docs sometimes crashing and IEtherpad sometimes going unresponsive) and I will switch.
- ptman 15y agoI wouldn't even need ^i and ^b. I wish they added a Markdown "syntax" mode. And it could be interesting if you could download the history as a git repo.
- civilian 15y agoSuggestion: The style should stay user-independent, but the text syntax should be shared. I mean... it would be bizarre if one person thinks that they're editing Python and another is editing Java
- dmnd 15y agoJust used this for a phone interview. I knew it was a bit risky to do that on launch day, but decent support for syntax highlighting, indentation, and showing the other user's cursor made me think this was a use case this app was built for. It was great for 30 mins but after that we started to get connectivity issues and had to move to TitanPad. Once it's more stable I'll switch for sure though.
- dadads 15y agoLooks like a cool web app, although I fail to see this as a commercial product. I would use this only as a free product, and I'm sure as hell that my friends won't pay for this either. Maybe I just lack vision, but I don't see how this app can possibly pull in big revenue. Can someone please prove me wrong?
- Raphael 15y agoBusinesses definitely need apps like this. Beats the hell out of emails and MS Word.
- Maascamp 15y agoI'm not sure you understand what businesses actually use email and Word for.
- jeffreymcmanus 15y agoIf it added a few more features (like an API, cloud storage and embeddability) I would pay for it.
- pwim 15y agoThe article notes they didn't use any of EtherPad code. Why not?
- jeffreymcmanus 15y agoProbably to avoid the GPL?
- kam 15y agoEtherPad is under the Apache License (non-viral, like BSD)
- ptman 15y agoEtherPad is Java. That is one of the reasons I never installed it on my own server.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- blackboxxx 15y agoDoes YC invest in innovation? If so, why am I not seeing innovative startups? If not, is it because iterative 'also ran' stuff is a safer investment?
- thomasgerbe 15y agoI'd say some of their examples have resulted in innovation (Heroku, Airbnb), but overall, I think most incubators seem to play it safe. I really wonder if the next Google/Facebook sized company will come through an incubator or sidestep that process altogether.
- nitrogen 15y agoInnovation in the form of incrementally improving existing ideas, or providing a better implementation of a current idea, is still valuable to society and to investors. Google was an "also ran," as was the iPod. Both products (search and MP3 players) had been done before.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- shorbaji 15y agoCongrats on the launch Stypi team. Just curious about the underlying tech. Are you using operational transformation (OT) like google docs does OR are you using an alternative such as causal trees (CT)?