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Google acquires AppJet/Etherpad
- bradgessler 17y agoCongratulations to the AppJet/Etherpad team. When I thought about your "exit" options, Google was at the top of the list. This doesn't surprise me given how talented you folks are and the real-time web expertise that Google needs more of these days. It really really sucks to see Google shutting down Etherpad though. We used it at Poll Everywhere quite a bit for collaborative coding, now we'll have to find something else. Any chance you could convince Google to keep Etherpad around in some form? sigh Google kills another innovative product.
- freetard 17y agoGoogle is not stupid, they will not kill but improve Etherpad and merge it into google wave making both google wave and etherpad more awesome.
- ALee 17y agoAs long as Etherpad is given creative control, I think they will create the next google product I love. At JamLegend, Etherpad was the preferred tool for interviewing developers. Ccombined with video chat, we could meet anyone in the world.
- apit 17y agotry Gobby. gnu/linux only, iirc
- dchest 17y agoGobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms. http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/ http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/
- durin42 17y agoThere's also an extension for emacs that implements this: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Rudel http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Rudel It says it even works with Gobby.
- jacobolus 17y agoRuns on OS X is a bit of an exaggeration though. It can supposedly be installed through MacPorts, but the two times I ever tried, MacPorts installed about half of normal Linux distro, before failing on some broken dependency. If you want to go through several hours of compiling and several hundred megabytes of dependencies, with your fingers crossed that things won’t inexplicably break 3 hours in, feel free to try to install Gobby on a Mac. Personally, I’ll stick to SubEthaEdit, or whatever web-based editor, if I need collaboration. * * * I really think desktop collaborative editors should try to provide a web-based alternative front-end, for just this reason, that it’s nice for everyone to be able to contribute, and there’s no better way to ensure that than through the web.
- simonw 17y agoVery upset to hear EtherPad is shutting down. I've used it a bunch (projected on a wall it makes a great collaborative note pad for BarCamp sessions) - will have to find a good replacement.
- cschep 17y agothis feels silly, but is this opening an area for a new startup to clone them? They'd only be down one exit option. Albeit a very big nice exit option, but there are obviously people that would use their product.
- apgwoz 17y agoThe obvious way to make it more valuable is to integrate a web version with other editors--be they rich text or not. I'm not sure how easy it is to plug into Word, but seems like that could add lots of value.
- colinplamondon 17y agoWell, that sucks. I was psyched when I first read the subject, since I figured they'd be lending Google Docs their awesome text editor. Instead they're going to Google Wave, where the interface blows. Etherpad's lightyears more useful, more flexible, and more valuable. Blah.
- bradgessler 17y agoAgreed. When Google Wave first came out part of me thought, "Shit, this could kill Etherpad". Then I tried Google Wave and realized that Etherpad was completely safe. I guessed wrong, Google still killed it.
- eam 17y agoAs they say, if you can't beat them, you buy them.
- anonemployer 17y agoWell, hopefully the Etherpad guys will help Wave suck a little less ;-)
- est 17y agoI've missed Jotspot, now Etherpad. Just hope Google Wave will not be the next Google Sites.
- hello_moto 17y agoI used JotSpot, not too heavily, just as a company intranet. Google Sites definitely streamlined everything. Maybe because I'm not a power-user or whatnot. But Google Sites is way easier, leaner, and faster for me at the end of the day.
- mahmud 17y agoDon't be selfish. Someone just had their hard work payoff; for me it's better to know they have been rewarded for their effort, instead of me just being able to use a nifty web app. To the Etherpad guys: listen up! it goes like this, tonight, wherever you are, you're buying a round for everyone, capice?
- e1ven 17y agoCongratulations to the Etherpad team. It's too bad that AppJet never took off more as a product; It seemed like it had a lot of potential. Etherpad was a lot of fun- I used it internally on a few projects, after seeing PG's demo with playback. Hopefully you can add that feature to Google Wave while you're there; It was by far my favorite aspect of Etherpad. Even thought I can copy and paste my Etherpads into G:Wave, I can't keep the history, so that'll be gone forever in March, it seems.
- cpr 17y agoPlayback is an essential element of Wave; it's in there from the start.
- staunch 17y agoCongratulations!
- epall 17y agoI was wondering what the competition between those two would be...I guess there won't be any!
- est 17y ago> A number of ex-Googlers are AppJet executives, including CEO Aaron Iba, CTO J.D. Zamfirescu, and COO Daniel Clemens Goodbye Google, hello Google again.
- jodrellblank 17y agoSo, they had to leave Google to be able to create something Google wants enough to buy? What does that say about Google going the way of Microsoft or $any-other-big-company?
- bumblebird 17y agoThey're shutting down etherpad. They can't have wanted it that much, surely :/ Maybe they just wanted the employees back, or wanted to kill potential competitors.
- javery 17y agoIt seems like most of these guys came from Google in the first place, must be an interesting experience to leave a company, found a new company, and then have that company bought back. (I know it happens quite a bit)
- rokhayakebe 17y agoWell deserved. Etherpad is one of those products that really impresses you. You guys have earned it. Cheers,
- bumblebird 17y agoCongrats to the team, but it's a shame Etherpad didn't survive on its own IMHO. I thought premium accounts etc were coming?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- fizx 17y agoTechCrunch is claiming 8 figures, which would be a bit high for a simple talent acquisition. Seems like a talent+tech acquisition, more along the lines of FriendFeed than Parakey or Pownce. Edit: Parent formerly read: "...Seems like PR spin. Instead of shutting down a startup and going to work for big.co and risk being called out as a failure, work out a deal with big.co to 'aquire' the startup then shut it down. Maybe we need a new word for a talent acquisition, where the startup is shut down and just acquired as a more optimized way of hiring. ..."
- bumblebird 17y agoSorry for the edit, I decided I don't know enough about why Google would buy it to comment. I would think they have a good amount of talent/tech already working on wave. Perhaps more a 'buy to kill potential competitor'? Still sad to see Etherpad die :/
- madpragmatic 17y agoWhile I am happy for the Etherpad team, this is still disappointing. The most useful aspect of Etherpad was its minimalism, so it is a shame to see it absorbed into bloatware.
- jodrellblank 17y agoThe only thing that doesn't suck about this is that appjet consider it a good thing. I hope they get piles of cash from it. I kind of wish I'd got the private network edition and a handful of perpetual licenses before they pulled the plug though. I also wish Microsoft had licensed Etherpad technology for use in Sharepoint - goodness knows, it could use the improvement. Google Wave must already have piles of web/ajax developers.
- yan 17y agoAnyone know if more information will be released on the algorithms they use(d)?
- mahmud 17y agoIf they tell us the $ figures, I am sure you will be motivated enough to discover the algorithms all on your own in an instant, or at least I would :-) High rewards have a tendency to induce epiphanies. [Edit: Here is how I think it works, from my brief 2-day usage of it. Comet: persistent connection between client and server. First client connects to the server and creats a session. Server creates a "channel" with a file-handle/chan-id. Subsequent clients follow a URL to join the channel. Without the live editing, you can see how any write in one client's textarea can be sent to the server and broadcast to all the channel members. To allow for live editing, server keeps a "buffer" for the channel, initially empty. All clients have onKeyPress or similar keylogging javascript event handler. A client might do internal buffering, say up to N characters or up to an X terminator (space maybe) At the start, the server sends a test packet to each client and sees how long it takes, for timing purposes, call the time it takes to get a PONG response L for lag. So in the future, when a client sends a text snippet, it's timestamped, and the server subtracts the lag to get the actual sending time. On the client side, display is refreshed after server response. When you type something, it's being rendered by the browser, but once your buffered input is sent, and the server responds, the display is refreshed by client-side javascript, which also keep an internal "document text model". The server sends updates to your client's text model, and the view is rendered from this model. This allows the server to do all text-rearrangement on it side, so javascript isn't tasked with sorting time-stamped strings. Along with timestamps, each text segment is also ID'ed by user, this allows the rendering engine to assign colors to the text. Just wild speculation after giving this no more than 5 minutes of thought and another 10 to type it. ]
- tlrobinson 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
- est 17y agoAs it happens, anyone knew an Etherpad replacement or alternative?
- Alex3917 17y agoIf you have a mac, then you can purchase SubEthaEdit. That's what EtherPad was based on.
- jeff18 17y agoI actually did a ton of research on this a few weeks ago to figure out which collaborative editor to embed in my blog, and I'm sorry to say, EtherPad is 100x better than the nearest competitor, which is probably Google Wave or Google Docs. Frankly, the best alternative is to try to scrounge around for old EtherPad URLs and just reuse them until March. :(
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- alaskamiller 17y agoSquad, https://squadedit.com/ https://squadedit.com/
- trotzke 17y agoSquad is one of my passion projects. And while I love it, I've never really thought of it as a competitor/replacement for EtherPad. Squad serves a great purpose for developers working together on code, but it isn't embedable, and doesn't do wysiwyg text formating. It's focused on syntax highlighting and opening and saving local files. So for some it may be an alternative, but not for everybody.
- bnoland 17y agohttp://collabedit.com http://collabedit.com
- treblig 17y agoAnyone hearing anything on their valuation? Have the details of the deal been disclosed?
- bioweek 17y agoDoes anyone have any theories on why appjet never took off as a product? Everytime I think about it, it seems like the perfect idea; save people the pain of setting up a server, hosting it, etc every time they want to make a web app. Was it a bad implementation of this idea? Or was the idea just ahead of its time? Or was it something else?
- Alex3917 17y ago"Does anyone have any theories on why appjet never took off as a product?" Basically people aren't going to switch to a new way of doing text unless someone forces them. Only a very small minority of people use something like FreeMind or EverNote instead of Word as their primary writing tool, so how could appjet ever hope to get more than a tiny fraction of those people when their best functionality only works when you have multiple people? The only way to get mass adoption would be to force people to use it, which is possible, but only if you design the company around that from the ground up. Which I don't think they were organized to do, at least as far as I can tell. If Google wants to, they actually have the ability to force more people to use it. Not sure if that will happen, but I hope it does since I wish I were able to use it more myself.
- drcode 17y agouhm... I don't think you know what the original appjet program was for- It was a tool for building web applications.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- drcode 17y agoI was a heavy appjet user. It was indeed an awesome system. I think there were two reasons it didn't succeed: 1. It's niche was razor-thin. It required some skill to use, but was so minimalistic that many programmers would prefer to take the extra time to set up a "real" server. 2. Too ahead of its time I suspect tools like appjet will be commonplace in a couple of years. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the "Google Wave" thing is a ruse and that these guys are actually working on an online editor for Google App Engine... This could, in theory, turn Chrome OS into an awesome dev environment, no?
- ivankirigin 17y agoCongrats guys! Make cool stuff, and people have to pay attention.
- qeorge 17y agoGreat for the team, but this sucks as a user. I've come to frequently use Etherpad for ad-hoc chat rooms, and now its impossible to make new pads. I really hope EtherPad doesn't go the way of Jaiku. I really liked the product.
- sweis 17y agoCongrats to J.D. and Aaron.
- antirez 17y agoNow you have an idea for your startup. A cool application was just killed and you can replace it.
- flog 17y agoThis actually is the idea I've been working towards for the last couple of months. The backend is mostly sorted, but it would take another month or so to get a working product out the door. Does HN think this is still a viable idea if the Big G has entered the game as well?
- antirez 17y agoSure, the Big G didn't entered the game, forced the exit of the best player instead.
- jstevens85 17y agoAnyone know if these guys will be moving to Sydney to join the Wave team?
- stjarnljuset 17y agoI have never used Etherpad, and from the comments I'm a little saddened to find that now I can't check it out. Does anyone have an old Etherpad that I can play with, or even just a video of how it's used?
- Raphael 17y agohere's one http://etherpad.com/music316a http://etherpad.com/music316a
- paul 17y agoHere's a test pad: http://etherpad.com/FQMBcRK9x2 http://etherpad.com/FQMBcRK9x2
- stjarnljuset 17y agoThank you! This is actually quite interesting since it's a meta-conversation about Etherpad, and Aaron of Etherpad includes this: "Edits to the document are represented as mathematical functions that can be applied in any order, and have other special properties that make this realtime." Unfortunately I don't have the math background to really connect what that means.
- nym 17y agoThey should pull a foursquare ;-)
- DTrejo 17y agoUgh. I use etherpad. I want my etherpads to keep working! Argg (end of selfish rant, congrats btw)
- AndrewWarner 17y agoThere's no better tool for text collaboration right now. I've been using it for my interview transcripts. With Etherpad, I can let 12 people on Mechanical Turk each transcribe a 5-minute section of my interview. And they can all be on at once and none of them needs and account. I can even hit the play button and see how they work: http://mixergy.etherpad.com/ep/pad/view/23/latest http://mixergy.etherpad.com/ep/pad/view/23/latest
- neilc 17y agoDoes anyone know of a similar tool that provides the "replay" feature for text editing? I don't actually need collaboration, just screencast-like replay.
- blasdel 17y agoHopefully one of their former customers with a copy of the "Private Network Edition" will leak it for posterity.
- gaborcselle 17y agoCongrats guys!
- niallsmart 17y agoI don't understand all the negativity about etherpad being killed in this thread. Sounds like an opportunity to me...if you reckon it's so useful, and google are going to kill it, then go build etherpadv2 and charge for it. :)
- Tichy 17y agoWhat's the point in shutting it down? Will Google buy every company that creates an editor like that? That can't work well forever.
- CytokineStorm 17y agoThis seems to me like a classic case of a company buying another company just for it's patents. I'd be willing to bet that the main reason Google is buying Etherpad is their synchronization patent and any other patents Etherpad owns that cover the functionality of Google Wave. Google probably won't use any of the Etherpad code in Wave.
- icco 17y agoSadest thing I have heard in a while. I guess I'll give squadedit a try now.
- strlen 17y agoI am somewhat interested in their comet container which is based on JVM + Rhino. I am guessing they've rolled their own (using their raw NIO or Netty), rather than go with Jetty's "Continuations". I wonder if there's any chance Google will open source it, much like Facebook outsourced FriendFeed's Tornado? I am also curious about their distribution model (how do you provider a consistent experience if this is to run on multiple machines?) -- or lack thereof (do they use load balancer "magic" to ensure that all collaborating on a single specific session go to a single machine, potentially creating hot spots)?
- stuntgoat 17y agoCongratulations Etherpad!! -- Why does everyone assume google will destroy the clean interface of Etherpad? Why, instead do people think the Wave interface won't be customizable, since it is an open api? http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html """The Google Wave API is an open platform allowing developers to extend the functionality of Google Wave itself . . ."""
- zhyder 17y agoWe've been working on a solution with Operational Transform as well... but looking at the kind of demand you guys have for it, sounds like we (and other startups) should rush to fill the void left by Etherpad.
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoAs a startup founder I'm happy to see financially successful exits. But as a user I have to wonder whether the software I like is a mere byproduct of an elaborate job application process.
- kwamenum86 17y agoPrice?
- modelic3 17y agoFuck this. Part of starting new things is to disrupt the status quo. At this point google is the status quo and they are not disrupting anything so the EtherPad guys are just douchebag sellouts.