
The strange story of etherpad - soundsop
http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201103#13
======
aaroniba
Cofounder and former CEO of EtherPad here. I appreciate your kind words about
our product. Allow me to clarify some aspects of the story.

First, we knew etherpad was more than a toy. We knew people were using it for
real work. We had paying customers and thousands of dollars a month in
revenue. (Not a lot of revenue, but decent evidence that etherpad was more
than a toy).

Second, the relationship between etherpad and appjet is much different from
how you characterize it. AppJet was a _failing_ idea. We had like no users. We
had spent over a year building this developer platform and we had practically
zero developers actually using it. It clearly wasn't working. We were
_ecstatic_ when etherpad took off. After etherpad took off, we shut down
appjet.com and focused our entire company on etherpad. appjet.com redirected
to etherpad.com. It felt great to have a product that people were actually
using!

Third, we never thought the Wave product was better than the etherpad product.
However, the Wave vision was pretty awesome. Lars' narrative excited a lot of
people when he delivered the announcement at Google IO '09. When we met with
him, we were dazzled by his vision and the team's optimism. Perhaps we were
naive.

The decision to sell to Google was one of the toughest decisions I and my
cofounders ever had to wrestle with in our lives. We were excited by the Wave
vision though we saw the flaws in the product. The Wave team told us about how
they wanted our help making wave simpler and more like etherpad, and we
thought we could help with that, though in the end we were unsuccessful at
making wave simpler. We were scared of Google as a competitor: they had more
engineers and more money behind this project, yet they were running it much
more like an independent startup than a normal big-company department. The
Wave office was in Australia and had almost total autonomy. And finally, after
1.5 years of being on the brink of failure with AppJet, it was tempting to be
able to declare our endeavor a success and provide a decent return to all our
investors who had risked their money on us.

In the end, our decision to join Wave did not work out as we had hoped. The
biggest lessons learned were that having more engineers and money behind a
project can actually be more harmful than helpful, so we were wrong to be
scared of Wave as a competitor for this reason. It seems obvious in hindsight,
but at the time it wasn't. Second, I totally underestimated how hard it would
be to iterate on the Wave codebase. I was used to rewriting major portions of
software in a single all-nighter. Because of the software development process
Wave was using, it was practically impossible to iterate on the product. I
should have done more diligence on their specific software engineering
processes, but instead I assumed because they seemed to be operating like a
startup, that they would be able to iterate like a startup. A lot of the
product problems were known to the whole Wave team, but we were crippled by a
large complex codebase built on poor technical choices and a cumbersome
engineering process that prevented fast iteration.

I'm grateful for the many lessons learned through the whole experience. And
I'm hopeful that the same software engineering and product skills that
produced etherpad, combined with the many valuable lessons learned through the
Google acquisition, will be able to produce even better products in the
future. My cofounder David Greenspan and I have both left Google, so we are
not, as you say, stuck in the vortex.

If you have more specific questions, I'd be happy to provide additional
clarification.

~~~
modeless
AppJet had so many great ideas; it's a shame you had to abandon it. Hosted
server-side javascript with a web-based IDE is still a good idea.

~~~
wioota
NodeJS, github and the Cloud9ide (powered by ACE editor) is a pretty good
ecosystem for this. You can run it on Joyent's no.de hosting or EC2 (or the
many other NodeJS hosting services springing up).

------
noibl
_Google Wave wants me to live inside it: it's presumptuous. Etherpad is a tool
I grab when I want, and put down when I'm done._

Right. Real-time remote collaboration is novel enough to be able to say that
not only interfaces need to be developed for it but also behaviours,
etiquette, metaphors -- culture. You could see this with Wave. They were so
desperate to hold peoples' attention that they came up with all these new and
slightly silly words to help people conceptualise what it was they were
suddenly able to 'do'. Too much. Too soon. Too not-for-you-to-determine.

Meanwhile an idea that anyone on the street can easily formulate (shared text
editing) is still not widely available in a usable form. It's like promoting
the Twitter API and ushering everyone into a new world where everything is a
tweet and a tweet is everything, before you have a working tool for personal
subscription-based SMS distribution. All these other 'features'... they're
not. They're proposed desirable activities. Whether or not they're actually
desirable is a cultural development, not a software development. Until people
begin to take living, multi-author, _simple_ documents for granted on a large
scale, it's really too soon to say if it's a good thing that Bob can embed a
sudoku game in the agenda draft or whether a poll and comment thread is a good
way to decide where to have coffee or just a bit weird actually.

------
6ren
Sounds like a disruption:

\- worse features than the leading products (Google Wave, Word etc)

\- simpler, more convenient, cheaper, for a new use

The typical thing to do with such a disruption is to find the customers who
value it (typically, enabling them to do something they couldn't do before but
want to - "target non-consumption", or "non-consuming contexts"), and make a
business out of it (i.e. a low-cost business model). Then, keep improving it
til it has all the features of Word etc, but retains its special new
qualities... thereby replacing Word.

So... who would really _need_ etherpad? What situation would they be in? What
do they need to do? It can be helpful to imagine less skilled people than
you'd normally think of; or that the nature of the task means they can't
afford the time for complex setup; or that they are poor. i.e. something
prevents them from using Word. Maybe, a mobile app? And I understand that
groupware had a lot of promise, but didn't really take off... maybe find where
it did work (in large organizations) and transfer it to small (poorer)
organizations.

~~~
cabalamat
> So... who would really need etherpad? What situation would they be in?

Pirate Parties use etherpad (piratepad, to be precise) to collaboratively
write press releases. When you have a team of people who need to collaborate
to write a document _quickly_ , it's by far the best solution.

------
stephenhuey
I loved Etherpad! When I joined a startup back in 2009, I pushed hard for the
team to keep our information together in Google Docs, but one of our non-
technical leaders stumbled upon Etherpad and after trying to tear him away
from it I finally came around and realized how incredibly beautifully simple
and useful it was.

We were all working remotely, and we'd hop on the phone together and gather
around an Etherpad and it was so easy to tell what everyone was doing (as
opposed to Google Docs which had a major delay in updating the screen at that
time). I'm glad to see that it lives on at hackpad and PiratePad.

------
paul
I don't want to speak for the appjet/etherpad founders, but this story is very
wrong about them. They certainly did not consider etherpad to be a "toy" -- it
was their main focus for quite some time.

~~~
albedoa
I think the author did a satisfactory job of assuring the reader that he
doesn't know the story.

~~~
paul
That's not how human brains work. If he wasn't writing about Etherpad, he
shouldn't have used the name "Etherpad".

~~~
albedoa
Very true, I should consider all humans and not just this one.

------
kroo
_Where's etherpad development now? Well, it seems to have stopped._

Another former etherpad employee here. I just wanted to point out that
contrary to the comment above, there's a fair bit of active open-source
development on etherpad these days, though the folks there could always use
more help. Head over to <https://github.com/ether/pad> and pitch in!

------
seltzered
Thanks for writing this. I recently started an etherpad server at work, and
while it's still going to take some time to gain traction, I figure it's way
easier than sharing files on the network or teaching managers to use
subversion.

------
bluehat
<http://piratepad.net> has, for better or for worse, also continued to do a
large amount of development. They didn't go toward logins, more toward
licensing content, tagging content (particularly by language), and showing how
content links to other content. It is getting nearly wiki-like.

~~~
vdm
Where is the PiratePad fork code? I've been looking for a while because I am
interested in the wiki features and can't find it.

~~~
MBlume
My understanding is that you want redhog's branch:
<https://github.com/redhog/pad>

------
krosaen
I enjoyed this, but I think the author wants Google Docs to suck more than it
really does in order to fit the narrative; I _love_ google docs, even if it
wasn't the first to get real time collaborative editing to work smoothly.

 _The UI for sharing a document (especially with users outside @gmail.com) is
too complicated for mere mortals, such as me, to make work. I'm told it can be
done, but it's as good as missing._

Really? Is hitting "share" and then setting the permissions to "Anyone with
the link" that baffling?

~~~
bostonvaulter2
He might be referring to the private sharing to people without @gmail.com
addresses, which is indeed quite difficult.

------
toddmorey
This strikes me as very similar to how DropBox has gained so much traction in
a crowded space. They give you a folder. That syncs. Simply and seamlessly.
Sometimes success comes as much from what's missing as what's included.
EhterPad is as close to a real whiteboard for remote collaborators as I've
ever seen.

------
orph
If you miss etherpad, we've been continuing development over on
<https://hackpad.com>. You might like it.

~~~
didip
It broke after I logged in. Additional information is here:
<http://i.imgur.com/ZHSGb.png>

~~~
orph
Awesome thanks for posting! I'm on it. ... fixed now!

------
maxwin
This is a very insightful article. Etherpad is still my favorite real time
text editor after trying all the other products such as google docs.

------
tensafefrogs
Not one mention of SubEthaEdit, which has been around for years and is
awesome:

<http://www.subethaedit.net/>

A collaborative code editor for mac.

------
ScottWhigham
This story will probably get lots of votes because so many of us loved
etherpad. However, this isn't the "story of etherpad", is it? Isn't this more
like "What some outsider thinks happened to the etherpad team"?

Maybe I missed his quotes from insiders on the deal or on the current thinking
of the AppJet folks. When I see this kind of thing, it makes me wonder if this
whole thing is speculation that is presented more along the lines of a "What
really happened" or "behind the scenes" type of thing:

"But, you see, I don't believe that's what happened. I think what happened is
much more strange. I think the people who made etherpad really believed Google
Wave was better, and they still do. That's what fascinates me."

He goes on to say that his research uncovered this whole thing ("See, upon
further investigation, I learned that etherpad was never meant to be a real
product - it was an example product."). Does he ever cite his sources? Or is
the source just the comments in the HN post?

~~~
js2
First two sentences: _I don't actually know this story - certainly no more of
it than anyone who has read a few web pages. But luckily, I'm pretty good at
making things up._

------
sinaiman
Sweet write-up, I've used Etherpad way more than I've used Google Docs/Google
Wave, it's so quick and simple. Not having to sign in is one of the best
features. My team of 4 people use it as a huge to-do list and basically it's
evolved into our personal knowledgebase. I love it, I can't imagine working
without it now.

------
dools
Loved the story, and also loved reading notes from Aaron and David. I would
just like to say that I, for one, do want Microsoft Office on the web. I use
Google Docs all the time whenever a client sends me something Excel or Word
format and I need to work with it. I use Google Docs to create sets of user
instructions and save them as PDF, to create quick diagrams, etc. Google Docs
surely lacks many features required by a good word processor, but thus far
I've been able to live without them, and live without installing an office
suite at all.

------
mwdev
I'm trying to do something similar with outlines. It isn't so much a text
editor as it is a social collection builder. I call it insanely organized
social media. You can call it <http://MindWallet.com> .

Here is how I used it to cover the startupbus:
[http://www.mindwallet.com/?ItemKey=787541c7-0860-41ea-a21a-2...](http://www.mindwallet.com/?ItemKey=787541c7-0860-41ea-a21a-2322e06675c3&ParentID=06f246c1-b947-434a-95ce-2ca5bf7d0584)

You probably won't use it. No one else does. :-(

~~~
orph
Dude, why on earth do you need all those FB permissions? hackpad requests only
email, and the barrier is still too high.

~~~
mwdev
Future features. The goal is to give you a good place to org your friends and
get the updates you are really interested in.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
So, for the sake of potential future features that you think people might
want, but haven't yet implemented, and don't really know for sure, you make it
harder for people to use it now. For the sake of making it "future proof" you
put hurdles in place to prevent people from using it now.

People using it now gives you a working group of testers for new features.
Don't make it harder for them.

~~~
mwdev
Actually, let me be more clear. One of the core features is that we let you
post to facebook directly from mindwallet. We then need to read your stream to
let you know when you have new comments. The fb post and comments are given an
inherent context by were in your mindwallt you post from. This extends the
life of your post beyond the usual temporal stream. The perms we ask for are:
1: email to establish ownership of your mw account. 2: post to wall to let you
do so. 3: read stream to show you new comments 4: offline access to show
others in context comments when they look at your mindwallet.

I think I can remove friend's stream for now, but that is the only
unimplemented feature.

------
mark_l_watson
Good article. I set up a private etherpad for myself, friends and family
several months ago. Not too much use, but I keep it running. Probably the
sweet spot is local copies running for individual workgroups and maintain
index pads so people can find pads by category.

------
kasperset
I used Etherpad two days ago to edit fasta file and I could not agree more on
this one.

------
beefman
What's going on with AppJet? Was it another causality? Why did google take
down their "Absolute Beginner's Guide"? Is it available anywhere today?

~~~
guylhem
If you are using debian my notes are on
<http://fr.blog.guylhem.net/2010/12/installer-etherpad.html>

------
tmachinecharmer
PG essay writing link is dead! :( Where else can I find it?

------
vain
hacker news - where they still love etherpad and lisp!

~~~
mbreese
I think that's because they are both useful for _getting work done_.

And you forgot Python (for those of us that prefer spaces to parens).

~~~
vain
Python, atleast is practical, unlike lisp which is harped on and on because a
certain personality likes it

