EtherPad

Over the past 2 weeks, we have been slowly letting people in to the EtherPad beta from the waiting list. If you still have not received an invite, then thank you for being patient. We are working as hard as we can to upgrade our systems to support more users.

It turns out that scaling EtherPad is challenging. In particular, the database behind EtherPad documents has some unique requirements. First, not only are your changes to pads reflected on other users' screens in realtime, they are also saved to our database in realtime. This way, you can open up an EtherPad document, type a few characters, and when you reload the page those characters will still be there. This pattern of usage involves frequent writes to the database.

We have a system design that is going to be extremely high performance, reliable, and massively scalable, but it's going to take another few weeks to implement. It's tempting for us to make short-term fixes and hacks to temporarily increase our capacity, but this ends up hurting the product in the long term. For example, there are some quick fixes we could make that would limit the possible new features we could develop. Or we could let more people into the beta but allow the latency for text changes to increase.

Instead of implementing these temporary measures, we're working towards building a rock solid foundation that will satisfy our needs for a while. Once we have our new architecture in place, we'll be able to focus entirely on features. We have been reading your feedback diligently, and keeping track of every single feature that has been requested, and we have ambitious plans for improving the product to address all of your wants, while maintaining the simplicity and ease of use that brought you to EtherPad in the first place.

To give you a specific idea of our timeline, we hope to be completely caught up with the waiting list within the next few weeks. After that, we will probably stay in "beta" (where you must sign up before creating new pads), but we will reduce the time between signup and getting an invite to less than a day.

Thanks again for being patient. Now we're going to get back to work.

-- The AppJet Team