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December 4, 2009

Google Acquires AppJet

Google buys yet another company: AppJet, the start-up that created EtherPad, an innovative online word processor. The EtherPad team, that includes three former Googlers, will join the Google Wave team. EtherPad will be available for the existing users until March 31, 2010.

"Other real-time editors like Google Docs work by broadcasting an updated copy of the document to everyone every 15 seconds. This creates a noticeable lag that gets in the way of collaboration. You start editing something, only to find 10 seconds later that someone else deleted it. Etherpad updates every copy of the document every half second. This 30x increase in speed changes the experience completely. Your edits hardly ever clash with other users'. So you work confidently instead of tentatively."  (from EtherPad's site)



{ via Paul Buchheit }

7 comments:

  1. The people using etherpads are not happy about this, not a bit.

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  2. I'm not sure why Google bought them. They basically have the same functionality in Google Wave already. I don't really see any particular innovations relative to Wave, other than perhaps the color-code-per-user text.

    Perhaps it's a patent buy?

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  3. Yup, this kind of collaborative editing is superseded by Wave. Wave uses Operation Transformation to broadcast and merge changes. It's a more powerful mechanism for collaborative editing.

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  4. Wow. Very nice post. Well done to you....

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  5. Wow... Google is just gonna a grabbing giant now a days... many of the newer technologies alongwith many more established companies are already undertaken by the great G.

    That's awesome..!!

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  6. As a former Etherpad user, I am not very happy. First Google bought "our" Writely and made it nearly unusable.. and now this. :(

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  7. Oh my. I simply cannot stand the voice in this video. Ewww. No no no.

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