Google acquires AppJet/Etherpad

http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/google-acquires-appjet

by dreeves • 17 years ago

258 98 17 years ago

bradgessler3• 17 years ago

Congratulations to the AppJet/Etherpad team. When I thought about your "exit" options, Google was at the top of the list. This doesn't surprise me given how talented you folks are and the real-time web expertise that Google needs more of these days.

It really really sucks to see Google shutting down Etherpad though. We used it at Poll Everywhere quite a bit for collaborative coding, now we'll have to find something else. Any chance you could convince Google to keep Etherpad around in some form?

sigh Google kills another innovative product.

freetard• 17 years ago

Google is not stupid, they will not kill but improve Etherpad and merge it into google wave making both google wave and etherpad more awesome.

ALee• 17 years ago

As long as Etherpad is given creative control, I think they will create the next google product I love.

At JamLegend, Etherpad was the preferred tool for interviewing developers. Ccombined with video chat, we could meet anyone in the world.

apit• 17 years ago

try Gobby. gnu/linux only, iirc

dchest• 17 years ago

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/

simonw• 17 years ago

Very upset to hear EtherPad is shutting down. I've used it a bunch (projected on a wall it makes a great collaborative note pad for BarCamp sessions) - will have to find a good replacement.

cschep• 17 years ago

this feels silly, but is this opening an area for a new startup to clone them? They'd only be down one exit option. Albeit a very big nice exit option, but there are obviously people that would use their product.

apgwoz• 17 years ago

The obvious way to make it more valuable is to integrate a web version with other editors--be they rich text or not. I'm not sure how easy it is to plug into Word, but seems like that could add lots of value.

colinplamondon3• 17 years ago

Well, that sucks.

I was psyched when I first read the subject, since I figured they'd be lending Google Docs their awesome text editor. Instead they're going to Google Wave, where the interface blows. Etherpad's lightyears more useful, more flexible, and more valuable. Blah.

bradgessler3• 17 years ago

Agreed. When Google Wave first came out part of me thought, "Shit, this could kill Etherpad". Then I tried Google Wave and realized that Etherpad was completely safe. I guessed wrong, Google still killed it.

eam• 17 years ago

As they say, if you can't beat them, you buy them.

anonemployer• 17 years ago

Well, hopefully the Etherpad guys will help Wave suck a little less ;-)

est3• 17 years ago

I've missed Jotspot, now Etherpad. Just hope Google Wave will not be the next Google Sites.

hello_moto• 17 years ago

I used JotSpot, not too heavily, just as a company intranet. Google Sites definitely streamlined everything. Maybe because I'm not a power-user or whatnot. But Google Sites is way easier, leaner, and faster for me at the end of the day.

mahmud5• 17 years ago

Don't be selfish. Someone just had their hard work payoff; for me it's better to know they have been rewarded for their effort, instead of me just being able to use a nifty web app.

To the Etherpad guys: listen up! it goes like this, tonight, wherever you are, you're buying a round for everyone, capice?

bradgessler3• 17 years ago

I don't think anybody is being selfish, its bittersweet: Accolades for the AppJet team and disappointment that Etherpad will be killed.

colinplamondon3• 17 years ago

It's awesome for them that they're getting a big check from Google, but that has no relevance to me as an etherpad user.

nopassrecover• 17 years ago

That's like saying it's good when a band starts making music to make money instead of to make entertainment/for the love of music. It's great for them that they have profited from their effort (and they have the right to do so) but the ultimate goal of all this should be to make the world a better place in some way, not to make money. Creating a sustainable way to improve people's lives is the goal.

pg• 17 years ago

The Etherpads themselves were very impressed with what the Wave guys showed them, and they are the best qualified to judge this sort of technology of all the hackers I know. Maybe some of the stuff they saw was unreleased, but whatever it was was, the Etherpads liked it, and they seem genuinely excited to work on it.

pvg• 17 years ago

It seems understandable that both buyers and sellers are pleased with the transaction, after all, they both agreed to it. It doesn't really address the OP's (however direct) 'that sucks' comment.

Any early-adopter of a start-up product accepts the risk that the company behind the product might be unsuccessful. Customers like that bet, in part, on the notion that despite the statistically long odds, the company is making every conceivable effort to stay alive and succeed.

The 'buyout-and-the-product-dies'-type exit introduces a sort of divided loyalty and misalignment between the goals of the founders and the goals of their customers - if you're unsuccessful you might fail and we might suffer an abrupt service termination but at the same time, if you're quite successful, we might also suffer an abrupt service termination.

skmurphy2• 17 years ago

If only they had interviewed at Google and joined the team they wanted to be on a year ago.

These transactions trade on the goodwill of early adopters. And they make it harder for other startups as potential early adopters start to assume that it's better to wait for what Google releases instead of investing time in a product that will be scrapped either if the company fails or is successful and acquired.

russss• 17 years ago

Yeah, as someone who used Etherpad every week or two (as well as Wave), I'm really annoyed that Google has shut this down. Shame on Google and Etherpad.

ilaksh• 17 years ago

See syntaxy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vib9hOL4Ju0 and similar tools in Wave.

ynniv2• 17 years ago

Don't conflate Wave-the-framework with Wave-the-product. A lot of time and effort were spent on Wave-the-framework, whereas Wave-the-product feels like a first cut demo. I assume that Wave-the-product will go through a number of revisions that will be more Docs like, and I expect EtherPad to be a part of that.

derefr• 17 years ago

Also, Wave-the-product might just be one client Google releases. If they really want to encourage a "Wave ecosystem," they'll likely pump out multiple clients with different focuses (including, hopefully, a new Wave-the-framework-backed Etherpad.)

bumblebird5• 17 years ago

What is 'wave the framework'? We've had XMPP for 10 years. And it still hasn't really taken off.

Frameworks are pretty useless unless you have a killer app built on it.

e1ven2• 17 years ago

Congratulations to the Etherpad team. It's too bad that AppJet never took off more as a product; It seemed like it had a lot of potential. Etherpad was a lot of fun- I used it internally on a few projects, after seeing PG's demo with playback.

Hopefully you can add that feature to Google Wave while you're there; It was by far my favorite aspect of Etherpad. Even thought I can copy and paste my Etherpads into G:Wave, I can't keep the history, so that'll be gone forever in March, it seems.

cpr• 17 years ago

Playback is an essential element of Wave; it's in there from the start.

staunch• 17 years ago

Congratulations!

epall• 17 years ago

I was wondering what the competition between those two would be...I guess there won't be any!

est3• 17 years ago

> A number of ex-Googlers are AppJet executives, including CEO Aaron Iba, CTO J.D. Zamfirescu, and COO Daniel Clemens

Goodbye Google, hello Google again.

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

So, they had to leave Google to be able to create something Google wants enough to buy?

What does that say about Google going the way of Microsoft or $any-other-big-company?

bumblebird5• 17 years ago

They're shutting down etherpad. They can't have wanted it that much, surely :/ Maybe they just wanted the employees back, or wanted to kill potential competitors.

javery• 17 years ago

It seems like most of these guys came from Google in the first place, must be an interesting experience to leave a company, found a new company, and then have that company bought back. (I know it happens quite a bit)

rokhayakebe• 17 years ago

Well deserved. Etherpad is one of those products that really impresses you. You guys have earned it. Cheers,

bumblebird5• 17 years ago

Congrats to the team, but it's a shame Etherpad didn't survive on its own IMHO. I thought premium accounts etc were coming?

fizx• 17 years ago

TechCrunch is claiming 8 figures, which would be a bit high for a simple talent acquisition. Seems like a talent+tech acquisition, more along the lines of FriendFeed than Parakey or Pownce.

Edit: Parent formerly read: "...Seems like PR spin. Instead of shutting down a startup and going to work for big.co and risk being called out as a failure, work out a deal with big.co to 'aquire' the startup then shut it down. Maybe we need a new word for a talent acquisition, where the startup is shut down and just acquired as a more optimized way of hiring. ..."

bumblebird5• 17 years ago

Sorry for the edit, I decided I don't know enough about why Google would buy it to comment. I would think they have a good amount of talent/tech already working on wave.

Perhaps more a 'buy to kill potential competitor'?

Still sad to see Etherpad die :/

madpragmatic• 17 years ago

While I am happy for the Etherpad team, this is still disappointing. The most useful aspect of Etherpad was its minimalism, so it is a shame to see it absorbed into bloatware.

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

The only thing that doesn't suck about this is that appjet consider it a good thing. I hope they get piles of cash from it.

I kind of wish I'd got the private network edition and a handful of perpetual licenses before they pulled the plug though.

I also wish Microsoft had licensed Etherpad technology for use in Sharepoint - goodness knows, it could use the improvement. Google Wave must already have piles of web/ajax developers.

yan• 17 years ago

Anyone know if more information will be released on the algorithms they use(d)?

mahmud5• 17 years ago

If they tell us the $ figures, I am sure you will be motivated enough to discover the algorithms all on your own in an instant, or at least I would :-) High rewards have a tendency to induce epiphanies.

[Edit: Here is how I think it works, from my brief 2-day usage of it.

Comet: persistent connection between client and server.

First client connects to the server and creats a session. Server creates a "channel" with a file-handle/chan-id. Subsequent clients follow a URL to join the channel.

Without the live editing, you can see how any write in one client's textarea can be sent to the server and broadcast to all the channel members.

To allow for live editing, server keeps a "buffer" for the channel, initially empty.

All clients have onKeyPress or similar keylogging javascript event handler. A client might do internal buffering, say up to N characters or up to an X terminator (space maybe)

At the start, the server sends a test packet to each client and sees how long it takes, for timing purposes, call the time it takes to get a PONG response L for lag. So in the future, when a client sends a text snippet, it's timestamped, and the server subtracts the lag to get the actual sending time.

On the client side, display is refreshed after server response. When you type something, it's being rendered by the browser, but once your buffered input is sent, and the server responds, the display is refreshed by client-side javascript, which also keep an internal "document text model".

The server sends updates to your client's text model, and the view is rendered from this model. This allows the server to do all text-rearrangement on it side, so javascript isn't tasked with sorting time-stamped strings.

Along with timestamps, each text segment is also ID'ed by user, this allows the rendering engine to assign colors to the text.

Just wild speculation after giving this no more than 5 minutes of thought and another 10 to type it.

]

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

est3• 17 years ago

As it happens, anyone knew an Etherpad replacement or alternative?

Alex39172• 17 years ago

If you have a mac, then you can purchase SubEthaEdit. That's what EtherPad was based on.

jeff18• 17 years ago

I actually did a ton of research on this a few weeks ago to figure out which collaborative editor to embed in my blog, and I'm sorry to say, EtherPad is 100x better than the nearest competitor, which is probably Google Wave or Google Docs.

Frankly, the best alternative is to try to scrounge around for old EtherPad URLs and just reuse them until March. :(

alaskamiller• 17 years ago

Squad, https://squadedit.com/

trotzke• 17 years ago

Squad is one of my passion projects. And while I love it, I've never really thought of it as a competitor/replacement for EtherPad.

Squad serves a great purpose for developers working together on code, but it isn't embedable, and doesn't do wysiwyg text formating. It's focused on syntax highlighting and opening and saving local files. So for some it may be an alternative, but not for everybody.

bnoland• 17 years ago

http://collabedit.com

treblig• 17 years ago

Anyone hearing anything on their valuation? Have the details of the deal been disclosed?

bioweek• 17 years ago

Does anyone have any theories on why appjet never took off as a product?

Everytime I think about it, it seems like the perfect idea; save people the pain of setting up a server, hosting it, etc every time they want to make a web app.

Was it a bad implementation of this idea? Or was the idea just ahead of its time? Or was it something else?

Alex39172• 17 years ago

"Does anyone have any theories on why appjet never took off as a product?"

Basically people aren't going to switch to a new way of doing text unless someone forces them. Only a very small minority of people use something like FreeMind or EverNote instead of Word as their primary writing tool, so how could appjet ever hope to get more than a tiny fraction of those people when their best functionality only works when you have multiple people?

The only way to get mass adoption would be to force people to use it, which is possible, but only if you design the company around that from the ground up. Which I don't think they were organized to do, at least as far as I can tell.

If Google wants to, they actually have the ability to force more people to use it. Not sure if that will happen, but I hope it does since I wish I were able to use it more myself.

drcode2• 17 years ago

uhm... I don't think you know what the original appjet program was for- It was a tool for building web applications.

drcode2• 17 years ago

I was a heavy appjet user. It was indeed an awesome system.

I think there were two reasons it didn't succeed:

1. It's niche was razor-thin. It required some skill to use, but was so minimalistic that many programmers would prefer to take the extra time to set up a "real" server.

2. Too ahead of its time

I suspect tools like appjet will be commonplace in a couple of years. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the "Google Wave" thing is a ruse and that these guys are actually working on an online editor for Google App Engine... This could, in theory, turn Chrome OS into an awesome dev environment, no?

e1ven2• 17 years ago

I'd love to chat with you for a bit about what you liked about AJ, but your email isn't public. If you have some time, I'd love to discuss. cdavis@darkenedsky.com

modeless• 17 years ago

I used AppJet myself for small personal projects, and liked it a lot. However, it wasn't complete enough for commercial use, perhaps as a platform for another startup to build their web app on. For example they didn't support development outside their web IDE, multiple code files in a project, a storage system with known scalability properties, or paid accounts with higher resource constraints.

I know they were working on at least two of the four features I mentioned above before they decided to abandon AppJet in favor of EtherPad. Building their own app to prove their platform was a good idea, but I guess they just didn't have enough resources to work on the app and the platform at the same time.

I'm not sure what the AppJet guys would have considered success to be, but if they expected other companies to build commercial apps on top of their stuff I think they gave up too early.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

Congrats guys! Make cool stuff, and people have to pay attention.

qeorge• 17 years ago

Great for the team, but this sucks as a user. I've come to frequently use Etherpad for ad-hoc chat rooms, and now its impossible to make new pads.

I really hope EtherPad doesn't go the way of Jaiku. I really liked the product.

sweis• 17 years ago

Congrats to J.D. and Aaron.

antirez2• 17 years ago

Now you have an idea for your startup. A cool application was just killed and you can replace it.

flog• 17 years ago

This actually is the idea I've been working towards for the last couple of months. The backend is mostly sorted, but it would take another month or so to get a working product out the door.

Does HN think this is still a viable idea if the Big G has entered the game as well?

antirez2• 17 years ago

Sure, the Big G didn't entered the game, forced the exit of the best player instead.

jstevens85• 17 years ago

Anyone know if these guys will be moving to Sydney to join the Wave team?

stjarnljuset2• 17 years ago

I have never used Etherpad, and from the comments I'm a little saddened to find that now I can't check it out.

Does anyone have an old Etherpad that I can play with, or even just a video of how it's used?

Raphael• 17 years ago

here's one http://etherpad.com/music316a

paul• 17 years ago

Here's a test pad: http://etherpad.com/FQMBcRK9x2

stjarnljuset2• 17 years ago

Thank you! This is actually quite interesting since it's a meta-conversation about Etherpad, and Aaron of Etherpad includes this:

"Edits to the document are represented as mathematical functions that can be applied in any order, and have other special properties that make this realtime."

Unfortunately I don't have the math background to really connect what that means.

nym• 17 years ago

They should pull a foursquare ;-)

DTrejo• 17 years ago

Ugh. I use etherpad. I want my etherpads to keep working! Argg

(end of selfish rant, congrats btw)

AndrewWarner• 17 years ago

There's no better tool for text collaboration right now.

I've been using it for my interview transcripts. With Etherpad, I can let 12 people on Mechanical Turk each transcribe a 5-minute section of my interview. And they can all be on at once and none of them needs and account.

I can even hit the play button and see how they work: http://mixergy.etherpad.com/ep/pad/view/23/latest

neilc• 17 years ago

Does anyone know of a similar tool that provides the "replay" feature for text editing? I don't actually need collaboration, just screencast-like replay.

blasdel• 17 years ago

Hopefully one of their former customers with a copy of the "Private Network Edition" will leak it for posterity.

gaborcselle• 17 years ago

Congrats guys!

niallsmart• 17 years ago

I don't understand all the negativity about etherpad being killed in this thread. Sounds like an opportunity to me...if you reckon it's so useful, and google are going to kill it, then go build etherpadv2 and charge for it. :)

Tichy• 17 years ago

What's the point in shutting it down? Will Google buy every company that creates an editor like that? That can't work well forever.

CytokineStorm• 17 years ago

This seems to me like a classic case of a company buying another company just for it's patents. I'd be willing to bet that the main reason Google is buying Etherpad is their synchronization patent and any other patents Etherpad owns that cover the functionality of Google Wave. Google probably won't use any of the Etherpad code in Wave.

icco• 17 years ago

Sadest thing I have heard in a while. I guess I'll give squadedit a try now.

strlen• 17 years ago

I am somewhat interested in their comet container which is based on JVM + Rhino. I am guessing they've rolled their own (using their raw NIO or Netty), rather than go with Jetty's "Continuations". I wonder if there's any chance Google will open source it, much like Facebook outsourced FriendFeed's Tornado?

I am also curious about their distribution model (how do you provider a consistent experience if this is to run on multiple machines?) -- or lack thereof (do they use load balancer "magic" to ensure that all collaborating on a single specific session go to a single machine, potentially creating hot spots)?

stuntgoat• 17 years ago

Congratulations Etherpad!!

Why does everyone assume google will destroy the clean interface of Etherpad? Why, instead do people think the Wave interface won't be customizable, since it is an open api?

http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html

"""The Google Wave API is an open platform allowing developers to extend the functionality of Google Wave itself . . ."""

zhyder• 17 years ago

We've been working on a solution with Operational Transform as well... but looking at the kind of demand you guys have for it, sounds like we (and other startups) should rush to fill the void left by Etherpad.

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

As a startup founder I'm happy to see financially successful exits. But as a user I have to wonder whether the software I like is a mere byproduct of an elaborate job application process.

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

Price?

modelic3• 17 years ago

Fuck this. Part of starting new things is to disrupt the status quo. At this point google is the status quo and they are not disrupting anything so the EtherPad guys are just douchebag sellouts.

Google acquires AppJet/Etherpad

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