EtherPad

We are excited that Google announced Wave at their IO Conference, as a statement about the importance of real-time applications. We are excited for many reasons, but here are four:

1. Many of the impressive really real-time editing and collaboration features which were in the Wave demo are available today with EtherPad. Google explained how really real-time collaboration can save enterprises time, money and resources. EtherPad customers are already able to take advantage of this and we are pleased that Google will be supporting this movement.

2. The Google Wave team acknowledged EtherPad in their white paper as the existing web app that achieves the real-time experience they're seeking. Interestingly, the pace of really real-time innovation is such that the white paper is already out-dated a few days after its release. We rolled out rich text formatting for EtherPad a day after the Google press release.

   We are also excited that the "PlayBack" feature has found its way into Wave, where editing history can be played back in sequence. We posted a playback demo some months ago that animates an essay being written, letter by letter, as stored in EtherPad's edit history. This feature will find its way into EtherPad soon as an integrated tool for tracking contributions to a document.

3. Google's investment in Wave is a major validation that the really real-time collaboration space is important and growing. Many of us are former Google employees and we love to see that Google is validating the space in such a big and public way. We believe that other large companies will follow as the writing is now on the wall that the collaborative web necessitates real-time software.

4. Collaboration software sometimes belongs behind the Firewall. Many companies and universities want to be able to run software behind their firewall because of security or latency. EtherPad offers our customers a choice between the Private Network Edition and the On-Demand Edition because this choice is important. The Wave team acknowledged this choice as well, with plans to make Wave installations available for behind the firewall.

So how is EtherPad different from Google Wave?

First, the Google Wave project is the start of an ambitious platform for the really real-time web, and sounds to be months of testing and polishing away from release, whereas EtherPad is available now, so it is a bit premature to compare the two. But from the early sneak previews, it appears that the scope of the Wave project is much larger, including elements of public social collaboration, photo and video sharing, private messaging, etc., while we have a specific focus on document collaboration. We think that Wave's additions are neat and could imagine an EtherPad/Wave integration being quite powerful for certain use cases. However, when it comes to the kind of written work that most knowledge workers need to produce, we think that less is more.

Building on our track record of being the first web application to roll out really real-time collaboration and history playback, we will continue to pioneer innovation at a rapid pace. We have a lot of exciting features in the pipeline right now that we can't wait to release to our growing base of EtherPad enthusiasts.

We will be looking into the Wave platform with great interest. Interoperability with Wave is a possibility, if it fits with our mission of providing the best user experience we can. Make no mistake, we want the Google Wave platform to succeed! Our broader mission is to improve the state of real-time collaboration for people around the globe, and we feel the space is so large that there is more than enough room for multiple companies to create value. So we will continue to add value to our users by listening with big ears and partnering with innovative companies both large and small.