I intend to replace Etherpad
When etherpad launched in November 2008, I took notice. It was very similar to collabedit, a website that I had launched in March 2008. I quickly became a fan of etherpad and have used it for awhile now, preferring it over collabedit for most tasks. I stopped working on collabedit and moved on to other things.
When I learned that google had acquired etherpad earlier this week I had mixed feelings. I’m going to miss the service it provided, but I see an opportunity for collabedit to fill the void left by etherpad. I have been looking for another side project, but hadn’t considered revisiting collabedit until now.
I recognize that collabedit lacks many of the features that make a collaborative editor like this useful. I intend to spend time over the next several months adding these features. I would appreciate any feedback from etherpad users about what features would be the most useful. For this purpose I have created a new feedback forum at http://collabedit.uservoice.com.
Congratulations to the etherpad team, you deserve all the success you’ve seen. Best of luck with Google Wave!
And I already had Collabedit bookmarked as the only viable alternative — this is great news, thanks!
The most useful feature you can add would be to make it open source, thus providing a guarantee that this mess will never happen again.
Great news. Sorry to hear that Etherpad has been chewed up by Google but it’s good to know that you have an interest in getting things rolling again with Collabedit.
Good Luck.
I’m ready for you. Very good start and one of the best alternatives on the list so far. Simple, flexible and pretty. If your able to pull in the basic editing features of EtherPad (bold, italic, etc) then your gold. Thanks for picking it up again.
You’re not alone! The race is on
Hi Ben!
The first thing you should do is changing the URL format of the documents to http://collabedit.com/XXXX instead of http://collabedit.com/display?id=XXXX
Also allow the user to choose the url they want for the document if its available.
Keep up the good work.
CJ
a good place to begin would be to improve the design of the collabedit.
i think etherpad worked best because of the design+simplicity+ functionality
Good luck.
I tried out CollabEdit and I think the UI works well, for the features it has. That’s one of the most important features of EtherPad, and where most of the competitors fall flat. I think as long as you can keep the UI intact, as you adjust it to wider tastes, and add features, you’ll have some degree of success. I hope you manage to hit it out of the park, though! I’ll keep my eye on CollabEdit.
You’ll have to develop better realtime concurrency. I’d suggest going with Operational Transformation (OT) that Etherpad is based on instead of the diff/patch approach. Until that is done, I wouldn’t call it a replacement for Appjet. Not saying it is a great app, but that would be something I’d consider first priority in order to get concurrent edits seamless.