joshclarkson.net

I’m not lying, I swear I thought of this myself within the last year.  But yesterday I saw that the designers of AppJet released a web app called EtherPad.  They call it “real-time collaborative text editing”.   Think of it as a text editor with a chat component working together in the form of a document.  Each person logged into an “EtherPad” can edit the document and everyone can immediately see the changes of any other editors shown in display as different colors.  They have setup an unguessable hashed url system for “Pads” that are created on the fly but you can also create named EtherPad pages of your own choosing.

EtherPad also carries a simple way to save and restore multiple revisions of the document throughout the process. I told you up above that I thought of this before. In my idea however I was thinking that this would be good as basically a beefed up wiki engine. So that the edit page of a wiki would have this in-line collaboration instead of being whole page edit. Maybe we will see this created next, who knows by me, or by others. I think that is the next step. Link these “EtherPads” together into a wiki format and you have a more intimate form of collaboration. Can you imagine how much more lively some of these wiki sites would be when down-to-the-sentence editing is done in real-time by different editors?  I can see how it could create a whole new set of problems as well.  But it is very exciting to see this kind of innovation and fresh ideas being brought to the forefront.