EtherPad: online word processor that focus on "real" realtime collaboration
As Online Office suites get more popular, some new smaller companies are specializing in specific attributes to differentiate themselves and find their positioning in the market. That's the case of EtherPad, developed by AppJet - a software company based in San Francisco.
EtherPad is an online application that removes all the clutter and focus on just one thing: Realtime collaboration. You might be thinking: doesn't Google Docs offer that already? The EtherPad team has an answer to that:
No. Google Docs is a suite of products that do many things, from word processing to spreadsheets to document management. One thing that Google Docs does not do is real-time collaborative text editing. We think this is an important use case, so we built EtherPad with real-time collaboration as the focus.
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).
EtherPad has a simple but effective interface, using colors to differentiate each user on the text body. Some of the use cases they provide include: meeting notes, meetings, teleconferencing, drafting and editing prose, program as a team and engineering phone interviews.
The Free Edition lets you create public pads on etherpad.com with no user accounts and minimal security. If you want to use it seriously, the SaaS Professional Edition is free for up to 3 users, and costs USD $8/user/month. There is also the Private Network Edition for USD $99/user, in case you want the software to run in your own servers.
Try EtherPad here.
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