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The whole WhatsApp acquisition touches on some of the same personal nerves that Google's acquisition of EtherPad did. It was a really great product that I used
by malanj 12y ago
The whole WhatsApp acquisition touches on some of the same personal nerves that Google's acquisition of EtherPad did. It was a really great product that I used daily. At the time Google had big plans for their Wave product, and the entire deal seemed to make sense. Fast forward a few months and Wave is a dud and EtherPad is no more.
I'm not saying that WhatsApp won't be useful to Facebook, but I do think that the philosophy and goal of the two companies are very different. Ads is one potential "technology" that could monetise the product and it's obviously against the founders' philosophy. There will however probably be many other (more subtle) influences from Facebook's side that'll slowly shift it away from the original vision - and promises to users. That's life I guess: take the cash or keep you vision.
- afarrell 12y agohttps://etherpad.mozilla.org/ https://etherpad.mozilla.org/
- LukeB_UK 12y agoEtherpad is now an open source product. In fact, it is still being developed, and is currently being rewritten in JavaScript to run on Node. Wave as a product no longer exists, however a lot of the technology that Google used has been merged into other products such as Google docs.
- dirkc 12y agoThe project lost a lot of momentum after Google acquired the developers working on Etherpad. I think the original codebase got forked as the Etherpad Lite project that is still being developed.