EtherPad is a web-based word processor that offers a productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting session, education, team programming and more. Despite Google Docs, which is quite useful for word processing and document management, EtherPad has a main advantage: supports realtime collaborative text editing. This comes with a number of really cool features such as:
- Ability to copy and paste a link in order to share the document with other people
- Highlighting each author’s contributions with a unique background color
- Support for infinite undos and the insurance that every operation is forever undo-able
- The pads are trackable and sortable by authors
Etherpad updates every copy of the document every half second. This 30x increase in speed changes the experience completely. Your edits hardly ever clash with other users’. So you work confidently instead of tentatively.
- Tested on: IE 6+, Safari 3+, and FireFox 2+
- Source: http://etherpad.com/
- Pricing: Free (Free Edition), $8/user/month (Professional Edition: free up to 3 users), $99/user (Private Network Edition)