No.

Google Docs is a suite of products that do many things, from word processing to spreadsheets to document management. One thing that Google Docs does not do is real-time collaborative text editing. We think this is an important use case, so we built EtherPad with real-time collaboration as the focus.

For example, 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. Imagine if whiteboards or telephones had this kind of delay! In contrast, the EtherPad infrastructure is built to carry your every keystroke at the speed of light, limited only by the time it takes electrons to travel over a wire (such as an "ethernet" cable).

EtherPad stacks up favorably in other ways as well:

• Google Docs are cumbersome to share with other people. It requires sending an email, and all collaborators must have a Google Docs account. With EtherPad, you just copy and paste a link, no emails or accounts required.
• Google Docs does not highlight who typed what, so with more than 2 editors, things get chaotic and confusing very quickly. EtherPad makes things clear by highlighting each author's contributions with a unique background color.
• One of the most basic operators for editing text is "undo." In Google Docs, while collaborating, you lose undo history whenever someone else makes a change. EtherPad supports infinite undos and ensures that every operation is forever undo-able, even in the presence of other editors.

Of course, EtherPad is a tool for a specific purpose, and depending on your needs, Google Docs may still be a suitable option for working together on documents. But for real-time collaboration, EtherPad beats Google Docs hands down.

See also: our definition of real-time

Eventually, our plan is to provide a for-pay service to companies or individuals who would like to have their data hosted securely on our servers, or license our software to run internally within an organization's private servers. If you are interested in trying out EtherPad on your organization's private servers, see our pricing page.

For now, we offer the free version of EtherPad as a service, which is already useful in a number of use cases. In the free versions, pads are partially secured by creating unique and non-guessable URLs. Generally, only people who know the URL to your pad will be able to access its contents. In this way, you can control access to a pad. You can think of the randomly-generated URL as a sort of password.

For more details, see our Privacy Policy.

We fully support IE 6+, Safari 3+, and FireFox 2+. Use other browsers at your own risk :). If you encounter any bugs in any of these browsers, kindly let us know by reporting it in the forums.

Not yet. You can go a long way with plain old text, and we think EtherPad is useful in its current form. Still, we are considering adding rich text features. If this is important to you, then please let us know in the forums.

No. Any pad you create will be available forever.

Sorry to hear that!

Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do to help you. EtherPad doesn't have accounts, and because pads are not linked to users, there's no way for us to get a pad link back to you.

That said, we do have a couple suggestions. If you lost a link recently, then you might find it in your browser's history. If it's not there, then see if someone you may have sent the link to can send it back to you.

In the future, we will offer paid accounts with the ability to keep track of all the pads you've ever edited. See the pricing page for more info.

No. Once you create a pad or save a revision, that pad or revision will be accessible forever.

In the future, we will offer paid accounts with greater control over your pads and revisions. See the pricing page for more info.

Yes! To create a custom name/URL for a pad, just type it in to your browser and visit that URL. You will then be prompted to create the pad.

For example, if you want to create a pad called "spyway-rocketship", you would just visit the url http://etherpad.com/spyway-rocketship. If the pad does not already exist when you visit this URL, you will be prompted to create it.

Note that when you click "New Pad" from the EtherPad homepage, a randomly-generated URL is assigned. When you choose your own URLs, be warned that other users of EtherPad may stumble upon it if you choose a guessable name.

We are working on it!

We did a one-off tech demo for Paul Graham's essay 13 sentences to showcase some technology. It's not ready for prime-time just yet, but it will be soon.

We will post an announcement to our blog when it's ready for general use, so keep an eye out!

At AppJet Inc. we've developed some unique software to solve hard problems that other companies shy away from.

Other custom in-browser text editors tend to be either slow or quirky, owing to the difficulty of using browsers' built-in text editing mechanisms while extending them in new ways. EtherPad uses a novel editing engine, developed and refined at AppJet over many months, that provides a solid user experience without compromising on responsiveness.

Most collaboration systems merge text at the document level, or apply locking at the document or paragraph level. With EtherPad, character-level changes to a document are merged as multiple people type. In most cases, real-time collaborators can negotiate who is editing what parts of the text. In all cases, EtherPad ensures consistency between everyone's screens, regardless of the timing of network operations, using a novel synchronization algorithm.

EtherPad sends messages in both directions between the browser and the server, using a technology often called "Comet" or "server push". This comparatively recent innovation in web app functionality allows EtherPad to be fully real-time.

Finally, our own AppJet web platform allows us to develop rapidly and write clean code. The entire EtherPad application is written in JavaScript, and some code runs on both the server and the browser, notably the code for synchronizing changes to the document.