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I agree with you 100%.

The real shame is that etherpad got killed in the process. The alternative incarnations are not quite the same.

http://etherpad.com/

They provide alternatives.

everybody join this pad!

If "real-time collaboration" and "side chat bar" sounds familiar, it's Etherpad:

Etherpad.com

Google bought the company few months ago in order to improve their Google Wave and Google Docs offerings, and I'm happy to see these efforts come to fruition. Google left the Etherpad.com service up for some more time. The end of that grace period is April 14-th (2 days from now), so you have 2 days to go and check what the new Google Docs will probably feel like. Make sure to check out the timeline replay feature, downright eerie and good fit for Google's pattern of Ubiquitous Tracking of Everything, I think.

Just in case you don't want to have to click on a couple of links to get there.

Once you know what it is, the FAQ makes sense, but like way too many FAQs, it starts out by assuming you already know what the thing is and doesn't explain that.

Good question. I had to click a couple of links to get to the home page:

EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time. When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, ..

To understand how it is really different, you need to read the FAQ:

For example, with Google Docs it takes about 5 to 15 seconds for a change to make its way from your keyboard to other people's screens. Imagine if whiteboards or telephones had this kind of delay! In contrast, the EtherPad infrastructure is built to carry your every keystroke at the speed of light, limited only by the time it takes electrons to travel over a wire (such as an "ethernet" cable).

there's a reasonable explanation of what it is on the home page.

To the submitter, please include a link that explains what you're talking about next time.

Honestly, I haven't been incredibly impressed with Google Docs. The other day, a couple of friends and I tried to collaboratively edit a document, but each person would only think that one other person was editing the document, and the only way we could see each other's updates was to refresh the page. Furthermore, changes are only pushed out every 15 seconds from the Google server, making real-time collaboration difficult. If only Google Docs were more like Etherpad...

I have had a Wave Sandbox account for a few weeks. I don't know why. Something to do with going along to two Google developer events in London.

I don't buy that it's going to replace e-mail. The great thing about e-mail is that it is already massively distributed and established. There are e-mail clients already existing for every platform. Pretty much the first application that gets written for any operating system these days is an e-mail client or a web browser. E-mails are sent in an extremely easy-to-understand, widely implemented format - plain text. There are already hundreds of e-mail servers, and if you are using a mature Linux distro like Debian or whatever, e-mail isn't that complex to set up.

Wave requires much more technology: you've got to host XMPP, you've got to host whatever interface magic you are doing to serve up the Wave experience to the end user (which means another HTTP service, at least until Wave clients start being available for Windows, Mac and $YOUR_PLATFORM), you've got to host all the media that gets dumped into the Wave. Beneath all of that, you've got to understand a fair bit about XMPP, and you've got to understand a fair amount of the complexities of XML, HTML, JS and so on. And, well, is the extra complexity and extra cost (in resources) of Wave really worth it? I'm not sure it is.

As a technology, Wave is awesome. Drag and drop files into your browser and watch them appear magically on another computer. The tech demo is really impressive. I'm impressed by Wave as a demo of just what is possible using the browser and a stack of open standards and open source technologies. I'm just not convinced that it's really been thought through. It won't replace e-mail or IM: it's too complex compared to them. As for collaboration, compare it with wikis or EtherPad - both are also a lot simpler. The Wave UI is mind-bogglingly complicated. There's no way my parents are going to be riding the Wave.

Wave seems to be predicated on there being something wrong with e-mail. I don't think there is. The only problems with e-mail are social, not technological. The primary problem with e-mail is that people don't follow RFC 1855 - people sending stupid rumours and chain letters, spam and spammy notifications, HTML crapola, and not being able to figure out how to quote correctly. Oh, and paranoid corporations who feel the need to shove 20K of legal crap at the bottom of the e-mail telling me that it's confidential (I never signed anything), that if I got it in error I should delete it (no, fuck off), not to print it out (I'll do what I want with my e-mail and my laser printer) and that it's been through their virus scanner (okay, how does that affect me?).

Summary: Wave is a cool tech demo, but I don't buy that it's a replacement for e-mail.

Google Wave is like subethaedit and etherpad, whereas subethaedit and etherpad are just applications that can't even talk to each other, Google is banking on the idea that these kinds of applications will one day become ubiquitous, and at the very least, it's trying to set itself up as the new leader of the pack in that area.

Now Google Wave is not going to replace email (thought, it may help decrease the actual number of emails in some situations). And Google Wave may not even be the final winner in this area (it's still way too early to tell in my opinion). But you've got to admit, Google Wave is much more lightweight, open, and cheaper, in that area than anything that Microsoft might have come up with -- thus far.

In that sense, it's more like a wiki.

When you're invited to an existing wave, nothing in the existing text appears highlighted. You only get to see the highlighted diffs in different colors if you hit the rewind/replay button and flip through the previous versions. I think that's probably what you saw. Also, when people are contributing to the wave at the exact same time, only their cursor (with different colors and with their names on it) appear ahead of the text they're typing. It doesn't actually highlight the entire contribution like it does in Word tracking, or like it does on etherpad.

That being said, if you've previously read a wave, and come back to it later on after someone made some changes, it shows you all the changed text in yellow. But here, it assumes you're not interested in who made the changes, but just in the fact that some changes were made (that's why it only uses only one color in that scenario). But frankly, the yellow doesn't really bother me, it seems to disappear pretty quickly (either when you reload the wave, press the 'mark read' button, or when you start editing the wave).

SubEthaEdit is different - what the grand-parent poster is pointing to is remote sessions - where you basically take your text editor (or LISP runtime or whatever Emacs is these days) and can log into it remotely and execute commands. A bit like GNU Screen or a bit like VNC.

What makes SubEthaEdit cool is the collaborative editing environment: that lets you have one document with multiple people editing it at the same time all using their own installations of SubEthaEdit. Well, there actually is a way of doing that with Emacs too. Gobby is an X11/GTK+ app that does much of what SubEthaEdit does (but without the Mac OS X prettiness). IIRC, there's a plugin for Emacs available which lets it join Gobby/Sobby sessions. (Sadly, nothing for us Vim users.)

There's also EtherPad which is all written in JavaScript and runs in the browser. I use it for collaboratively scribing meetings. Sadly, much as I'd like Gobby to be cross-platform, it's not quite there: it works great on Linux. I've heard nothing bad about it on Windows. But on Mac OS X, it's a pain in the arse to get working.

This stuff: http://etherpad.com/ is really cool for collaborative text editing. It says it is intended for team coding too, although I haven't tried it.

Realtime, web-based collaborative text editor. If you don't especially care about the data being hosted out there amongst the tubes, free. (I suspect that the people suggesting SVN et al don't quite understand what pair programming is...)

http://etherpad.com/

Try http://etherpad.com/ -

EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time.

When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.

It isn't the only.

http://zeus.cs.drexel.edu

EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time. When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.

for simple plain text stuff: http://etherpad.com/

Slashdot Etherpad.

and pretty well-implemented. It doesn't handle deletions, though - something like Word's Track Changes for deletions might be nice.

There's a test room here: http://etherpad.com/as9F1Jh5cu