EtherPad

One of the easiest ways to collaborate with a business partner or colleague is to e-mail a document to them, but it is also one of the hardest habits to break too. And while e-mail is so pervasive and nearly instantaneous, the notion of serial collaboration—I work on the document, send it to you and you work on it and send it back—is clumsy. There are better ways. Take a look at Etherpad.com...for real-time joint editing, it can't be beat. You can also roll back to previously saved versions, which is a very nice feature if you are trying to find something that was lost in the edit stream.

Brilliant! Massively useful, saved me a trip to and from the office just now. And—here's the truly amazing part—I only suspected this site existed two minutes before I was usefully editing a document with someone else! Love the lack of a 'signup, then approve-via-email' step to start working. The person on the other end of the phone line simply thought it was something I used all the time (until I admitted the truth). That is usability! Hope you guys win some awards.

Wow! I'm shocked... I'm stunned... and I'm completely gobsmacked. Just over an hour ago, I sent a tweet to a colleague asking if she had any good ideas for a WWII day that we're running in school. She suggested setting up an Etherpad, inviting members of our Twitter networks to join and contribute ideas. After a few minutes, we've built up 23 ideas, with more being added as I type this! This is an amazing site, and it's going to be a great tool to use in the classroom. A huge THANK YOU!

EtherPad may be the first application to give us a taste of what is surely the future of collaboration: software that empowers teams to build shared mental spaces on the Web with the ease and confidence that formerly required huddling around a whiteboard.

A team of ex-Googlers, with backing from Y Combinator, the Friendfeed founders and others, have created... the most useful group productivity app we've seen. Etherpad, a new product from Appjet, launches this morning, and you must try it out. It’s comparable to Google Docs or a wiki, but it’s far more useful...This instantly became a must-use application for me. It makes phone calls a lot more productive - just open up a workspace and take notes together, in real time.

Etherpad is simply the most frictionless way to get people on the same page. At DropBox it's killed wikis, whiteboards and to-do lists for everything from meeting notes to writing copy to issue tracking.

First Class Marketing works with a diverse set of clients—from Fortune 500's to high-end boutiques—and we often need to react to the press quickly. Etherpad enables First Class to deliver PR and marketing results faster. Our clients save money and are happier with the end results thanks to Etherpad's really real-time capabilities.

Etherpad is also incredibly useful for bi-lingual marketing as many of our clients need to market in both Spanish and English and we can do the translations on the spot with client teams. Thank you for building such a wonderful product!

At Cloud Conversion, we're constantly on conference calls with clients and partners. So, we use Etherpad to increase collaboration and communicate more effectively. I'm excited for the CRM implications for both us and our clients.

As a journalist I sometimes find myself in need for a tool that will help me collaborate with my colleagues and will also let my editor see the work as it progresses, especially when working on a hot story. Etherpad became a must tool.

The ability to edit a document in real-time is wonderful for providing feedback to and working with distributed teams. Going forward I want to make this part of any call where written content is being reviewed or discussed. There are also unexpected benefits in group settings. While only one person in a group can speak at a time on a call, all members can contribute to the written document. This is a major benefit to those of us who wish that you could get more done in remote meetings.

After I showed EtherPad to a colleague, he could only say, "wow - that is exactly what we need!" Everyone I have shown Etherpad to at work and outside has fallen in love with it, and for great reason. EtherPad has allowed me to cut down significantly on hellish document iterations, collaborate effectively on calls, and save time sharing ideas with colleagues, partners, and advisors.

People have collaborated on documents since networks were invented (since we learned to write) but applications like Etherpad exploit the net to make old-fashioned monolithic documents into more fluid, social objects: things we make together. Etherpad is in use in schools and universities already and is catching on in business and media. The implications for teams like Ignite's are real.

Today provided me with one of those - 'blimey things are going to be different from now on' moments. After a staff meeting about guided writing with children last night, I put two and two together and realized that a tool called Etherpad could be a match made in heaven. I tested it with the class today by showing the class this video of Batman the Animated Series. Then I split them up into groups and assigned them each a few seconds of video to describe as a narrative, trying to focus on powerful words, pace etc. What was really powerful was that we could see the writing in real time and children were editing 'live'. The different colours also gave me as a teacher a really clear visual representation of how I was modeling the writing and in fact which aspects of the writing needed to be focused on next time.

It is changing the way that people work together on the internet. Inviting people to help you with the document is very easy and it's just a matter of copying the URL or clicking on the links to send them an email invitation. EtherPad is ideal for anyone that wants to work together with people all around the world on any projects that require text editing. It's great for programmers or writers and is one of the best and quickest ways to collaborate.

Finally, a robust, available-to-all way to write documents together live! Other Synchronous Editors all have one or more major drawbacks: SynchroEdit development stopped a couple years ago and has some data-losing bugs as well as not being as nice or full-featured an interface as EtherPad. SubEthaEdit is Mac-only; and Gobby can never seem to get a version out that people on all platforms can easily install and use together. GoogleDocs isn't really live; the many-seconds delay makes a difference for collaborative editing.

Simultaneous writing might seem like the authorial equivalent of the four-way intersection car crash in Steve Martin's "L.A. Story." Instead, we find it makes it possible for us to write faster (especially under deadline during real-time events) and to speed up editing, as well. EtherPad provides revision saving coupled with restoration from stored versions, something not found in SubEthaEdit. EtherPad's capability to save a version trumps SubEthaEdit's simple Save command, which overwrites the previously stored version. Etherpad will enable more unfettered communication.

I had the chance to use EtherPad as part of a job interview while it was in private beta. It was supposed to use Skype and EtherPad to get the full effect. Skype broke, but EtherPad worked great. The ease of getting code to the interviewer, and the ability to see the way I wrote the code were really helpful. If you're doing a phone screen interview in the future, I highly recommend using EtherPad.

I really enjoyed using it for the interview, and maybe it even helped me get the job.

Etherpad is the cleanest, simplest, free real time collaborative editor I've come across that works in Second Life. So forget collaboration, they are great for immersion - participants can see things happening.

A few weeks back I went to the sandpit web 2.0 session by Digital 20/20, which introduced me to Etherpad. This tool was new to almost everyone at the event and we set about a group collaborative task. All of us, after launching the page had the same reaction. AMAZING. This tool has no learning curve, needs no explaining and no introduction. It would work fine for someone one with little computer knowledge so removes barriers to collaborating between different computer knowledge areas. AMAZING.

I used it with two colleagues I met at the NYS Staff Development Conference — and I had not met them before the conference. We all went to different sessions, but I have the notes from all of them now! Better than a Google Document.

Etherpad, is fantastic for classroom collaboration. Being able to work in real time, with 'live' text significantly changes the interaction between students when collaborating. Not only can you 'see' who is doing what, but the digital text needs negotiation by the group. Knowledge is therefore being constructed in real time, using Etherpad at the centre of mutli-modal activities. Students could be using text books, visual resources or recording live events and dialogue. It bridged the gap between live blogging and chat, to a live activity that allows students to organize it. Best of all, there is nothing in 'Etherpad' that puts students at risk — it is a great tool, and will enable many classrooms to engage in 'live' activities — especially if the collaboration is over distance, cultures or disciplines.

Have you ever been taking notes in class and missed something important that the professor said? Maybe it was a blackletter rule. Maybe it was a point that could be on the final exam. It would be nice if you could just rewind class. With EtherPad, you can see your friend's class notes appear immediately as your friend writes them... so you can fill in the gaps.

Have you ever wanted to collaborate with your associates or friends in real time? Live collaboration can be hard to do, if you don't have the right tools. If you need to collaborate live, then head on over to etherpad.com. You are able to save revisions of your notes, change color of who's typing, and much more. Etherpad will be very useful if you are across the country and you need to have a meeting. Just go to the site, and your off to the races!

Online document collaboration has definitely changed the way people share and edit documents. Google Docs are cumbersome to share with other people. 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.

What a fun service. I can't remember the last time I used the word "fun" in reference to a text editor. It's really interesting to watch the POSTs fly by and consider the implications of out-of-order updates, breaks in the open downstream "comet" channel, interweaving potentially conflicting text from different clients.

I can definitely see a huge potential here for peer code debugging. When you just need to jump into a file and help someone figure out why it's not working or walk them through your ideas - this looks like it might just be fantastic.

There are few tools in the world that may be quite simple yet innovative. Like popular micro-blogging platform Twitter, Etherpad is also quite simple but innovative. I am wondering where was this tool before. People talk about various online collaboration tools like Google Docs, Zoho and so on. But none of them are as simple as Etherpad.

I found Etherpad is a great training tool as instructors in different locations could go through the documents with trainees explaining the corrections in real time. Recently, our team was working on a marketing proposal and shared it though EtherPad. I was traveling with my mini-notebook and could work on the proposal from Chennai and see the changes made by others in different locations and also discuss the changes instantly even though we were in different locations. We managed to sign off in a very short time, thanks to EtherPad!