EtherPad.com - Real-time Collaborative Text Editing

Self-dubbed as “the perfect way to collaborate on a text document and keep everyone literally on the same page”, EtherPad sets out to do something the ever-popular Google Docs has bypassed so far: the edition of text in real-time.

As it is pointed out by the programmers, the premise behind EtherPad was to come up with an infrastructure in which every keystroke is shown onscreen at the same time.



Moreover, the idea was to make for instant collaboration – if you think about Google Docs, you will remember how every person had to be a registered user in order to collaborate, not to mention that the actual invitation process itself is a bit time-demanding and cumbersome.

As far as the editing itself is concerned, this application betters Google Docs in the sense that you can clearly see who typed what. As anyone who has taken part of an editing session can tell you, this feature is particularly useful when more than 2 people are working on the same text.

Finally, another feature that merits mentioning is an unlimited “Undo” command that can be implemented no matter who did the last edition, or when it was done.

When all is said and done, this stands as a viable alternative to Google Docs. Check it out for yourself at Etherpad.com.