Google acquires EtherPad

When Google Wave first came out and people were talking about it, I kept talking about EtherPad. That's because EtherPad has a really nice, responsive, slick interface to collaborative document editing. Google Wave is less nice for that realtime interactive multi-user thing, in my opinion, but has the (lame!) advantage of being free if you want to index what you've done, instead of remembering all the IDs for your pages.

Well, that comparison is settled now. Google acquired EtherPad. Since I'd primarily moved to Wave for things like shared company note editing, I guess that's a win for me -- the EtherPad team will go on and hopefully make Wave better. The editing isn't as nice, and can be incredibly slow under Firefox -- hopefully this will improve now.

It strikes me as a teeny bit evil, in terms of squashing the only competition, but I'll benefit from it, and the founders of EtherPad probably aren't too upset either.

(Thanks to rukubites for the tip.)

[Update] Mm, yeah, I agree with what Glenn Fleishman said:

I've been using [Wave] for some weeks, and still find it baffling, where EtherPad was instantly explicable and useful (perhaps because it was so similar to SubEthaEdit, which pioneered simultaneous collaborative editing). I hope the AppJet team brings its approach with them.