

Stypi (YC S11) Is Etherpad Reborn - canistr
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-etherpad-reborn/

======
Mizza
Not to be a dick, but who cares? This just seems like a lame proprietary rip-
off.

Etherpad is alive and well, and it's totally F/OSS - Etherpad Lite was just
released and it's SUPER easy to embed in your own apps:
<https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite>

~~~
mechanical_fish
From the install docs for etherpad-lite on Github, step one:

 _As root:_

Okay, two words and we've just lost 98% of the computer users in the world.

 _Install all dependencies. We need the sqlite develob libraries, gzip, git,
curl, wget, libssl develop libraries and python:_

... and now we've lost most of the remaining 2%.

"SUPER easy" for you, "SUPER easy" for me, but the other 99.98% of the
potential customers would also love to use the product.

~~~
decadentcactus
Seems to happen to a lot of products that are 'simple'. It happened to Dropbox
("Why would I use this when I can do these other twelve steps to do nowhere
near the same thing") and the Ipod ("Why would I need this when I have a CD
Burner and a Discman" (srsly)). I think it's safe to ignore claims like it :)

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Eliezer
To beat Etherpad and Google Docs:

Let me hit ctrl-I while typing, type something and have it appear in italics,
and then hit ctrl-I again to turn off italics. Likewise for bolding, though I
use less of that.

Let me apply URLs.

Do this (while keeping it fast and without introducing any bugs worse than
Google Docs sometimes crashing and IEtherpad sometimes going unresponsive) and
I will switch.

~~~
ptman
I wouldn't even need ^i and ^b. I wish they added a Markdown "syntax" mode.
And it could be interesting if you could download the history as a git repo.

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dmnd
Just used this for a phone interview. I knew it was a bit risky to do that on
launch day, but decent support for syntax highlighting, indentation, and
showing the other user's cursor made me think this was a use case this app was
built for.

It was great for 30 mins but after that we started to get connectivity issues
and had to move to TitanPad. Once it's more stable I'll switch for sure
though.

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blackboxxx
Does YC invest in innovation? If so, why am I not seeing innovative startups?

If not, is it because iterative 'also ran' stuff is a safer investment?

~~~
nitrogen
Innovation in the form of incrementally improving existing ideas, or providing
a better implementation of a current idea, is still valuable to society and to
investors. Google was an "also ran," as was the iPod. Both products (search
and MP3 players) had been done before.

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DanielRibeiro
Cool. I was looking into Cloud9 yesterday, but Stypi really does the rick, due
to the syntax highlight and collaboration (cloud9 did not work for me), non
signup required and ease of sharing (simple url).

Great job guys!

~~~
rafd
Looks like they're using Ace underneath too. (<http://ace.ajax.org/>)

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gregwebs
where is the vim plugin?

~~~
ptman
I was wondering about the same thing.

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vtail
Feature request: please add Objective-C to the list of supported languages.
Thanks!

------
sgrove
I'm _super_ psyched about these guys - what they're working on has all kinds
of potential that ether pad never had. It's one of the missing kinks in the
modern development toolkit. I hope we'll get a chance to look into the API
soon - I know they're working hard, but I don't want to be patient :) we have
visions to fulfill!

~~~
sbirch
Yes! I want an API!

------
anandkulkarni
Looking forward to trying this! There's a lot left to do in collaboration, and
a commercially-backed piece of software will be able to achieve some
remarkable things.

Collaborative code editing, in particular, is really an unsolved problem, so I
can't wait to see where this goes.

------
gammarator
Feel the collaboration! stypi.com/pi2o36wr

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shorbaji
Congrats on the launch Stypi team. Just curious about the underlying tech. Are
you using operational transformation (OT) like google docs does OR are you
using an alternative such as causal trees (CT)?

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pwim
The article notes they didn't use any of EtherPad code. Why not?

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
Probably to avoid the GPL?

~~~
kam
EtherPad is under the Apache License (non-viral, like BSD)

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mef
Looks like node + socket.io for the push updates. Very snappy.

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dadads
Looks like a cool web app, although I fail to see this as a commercial
product. I would use this only as a free product, and I'm sure as hell that my
friends won't pay for this either.

Maybe I just lack vision, but I don't see how this app can possibly pull in
big revenue. Can someone please prove me wrong?

~~~
Raphael
Businesses definitely need apps like this. Beats the hell out of emails and MS
Word.

~~~
Maascamp
I'm not sure you understand what businesses actually use email and Word for.

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sudonim
Im surprised they don't have markdown or textile in their list of languages.

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civilian
Suggestion: The style should stay user-independent, but the text syntax should
be shared. I mean... it would be bizarre if one person thinks that they're
editing Python and another is editing Java

------
endlessvoid94
This is great. I'd love to see pair programming accomplished somehow with this
(on the web, not via screen or buffer sharing). Can we integrate a compiler or
static type checker into it?

------
breck
I loved Etherpad and am excited to read this. Are you guys using Ace for the
editor?

------
rorrr
So their competitors are just

    
    
        Google docs
        PiratePad
        collabedit.com
        primarypad.com
        TypeWith.me
        Sync.in
        EtherPad Foundation
        iEtherPad.com
        titanpad.com
        etherpad.tugraz.at
        etherpad.mozilla.org:9000
        sketchpad.cc
        okfnpad.org
        pad.telecomix.org
        twiddla.com
        ...
    

Now the real question that I'd love to be be answered is - why would anybody
fund this?

~~~
tptacek
Because if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list, the VC
firm gets a stake in whatever Stypi decides to build with the huge number of
users that implies?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but, it's easy to see why _you_ wouldn't
invest in it: because you can't afford to put that much money behind a 1:10 or
1:15 risk. But that's exactly the problem every VC firm in the world has:
finding the right set of 1:10 bets to put their money behind.

I feel like, if you're going to complain about people funding stuff like this,
you're really complaining about the whole VC model. And sure, I don't like it
either. So go build a company without it. Plenty of us here have or are doing
exactly that.

~~~
rorrr
That's a bold claim. Even if it becomes one of the top 4 companies, what's the
business model? Most of the sites I listed are non-commercial, absolutely
free. It's a bitch to compete with free services, and pretty much identical
functionality.

You must also realize that the sites I listed is just a small percentage,
something I googled in 2 minutes. There are many many players in the
collaborative editing "market".

~~~
nostrademons
One of my coworkers here at Google wrote a webcrawler and search engine -
probably _the first_ webcrawler, according to Wikipedia - back in 1993. It was
an academic project, deployed completely for free, with no possible way to
make money.

That didn't stop Google from making hundreds of billions of dollars off search
15 years later.

When investors look at a company, they look at what it could become, not what
it is now. Most gigantic megacorps started as tiny niches that nobody ever
believed they could make money from.

~~~
rorrr
Google didn't succeed because of a crawler. They succeeded because of pagerank
algorithm, a new invention (plus hiring the smartest people they could find).

And I'll ask again - what's so groundbreaking about this project?

~~~
kkowalczyk
You're missing the point which is: when Google was funded, it wasn't Google,
the king of search, as we know it today, but yet another search engine in a
saturated market, started by 2 academics with no business background.

The reason they were founded was that they convinced the investors that their
plans and ambitions go beyond what they've built so far.

It's a remarkable lack of imagination to not see a potential in a good,
collaborative web editor. Sure, if they don't ever write a single line of
code, it's not going to be anything special. But they probably will and they
probably have many ideas on how to move this project forward.

An obvious evolution would be to turn it into a web-based IDE, competing with
the likes of cloud9.

Or they could make it an embeddable editor widget usable by others (it's
surprisingly difficult to build a decent web-based editor and a lot of web-
based software (a forum, a commenting system, q/a sites) needs a good editor).

Or many, many other possibilities. Stop thinking of it as a finished product.
Think of it as a first step in a thousand-step journey and try to imagine what
the other 999 steps could be.

~~~
rorrr
It's you who is missing the point. Google was not "yet another search engine",
they invented something new, which gave them the edge.

You keep talking about the future possibilities, but you fail to point out
what gives this particular project that edge. What is it?

~~~
nostrademons
FWIW, PageRank is a relatively minor component of the ranking algorithm (I
dunno why people latch onto it...maybe because it's a public, patented, easy
soundbite), and the core Google ranking algorithm was entirely rewritten by
Amit Singhal in 2001. The ranking edge that most people associate with Google
wasn't even written when Google got its funding, and its inventor hadn't yet
been hired.

~~~
akkartik
I don't follow. Wasn't Larry Page the inventor of PageRank? And didn't he make
it while still at Stanford?

~~~
nostrademons
I'm saying that PageRank isn't the ranking edge that Google is famous for, and
that if you applied the ranking algorithm as invented by Larry and Sergey to
the web (even the web at the time, before everyone started to game Google), it
would suck. It might suck a bit less than AltaVista, which was why they got
funded, but it's not at all the quality that people have come to associate
with Google.

~~~
akkartik
Ah. When you say 'the edge Google is famous for' I think of PageRank.

~~~
nostrademons
Exactly.

