As someone who has been using Gobby for real-time collaborative coding recently, Etherpad is appealing because it is amazingly temping to link Etherpad with SVN. Imagine being able to have each author's changes automatically checked in to a repository on save.
One of the most limiting factors of Gobby is that access control is virtually non-existent, and it has no integration with any sort of version control. Hooks and scripts are required to hack up source control systems.
It seems like a startup would do quite well to create a service combining Etherpad and SVN (or another flavor of version control).
All that said, Gobby is a pretty fun solution for private collaborative editing. Watching colleagues fix your mistakes in real time (and doing it for them) never gets old.
Does anybody know if there is an Etherpad-like service that allows to draw charts/tables/`free style' stuff? I was thinking that that might be useful during brainstorming sessions to help crystallize ideas...
Could you save the list of users + colors? So, if John disconnects, I can check with the document and see that green were revisions John made. I know if John typed in the chat I could associate his color/name. Maybe highlighting colored text or mouseovering colored text would show the revisioner's name!
Otherwise, smooth and no complaints. Maybe custom urls? Then again I'm just lazy and could tinyurl for customizing.
Possibly an IRC like interface (with privs for writing) or read-only urls and read-write urls!
It's really nice. You don't really get the experience until you and someone else work on a pad simultaneously. (You can simulate it by opening the same pad on 2 computers/browsers, setting yourself up so you can see both at once, and typing in one to see just how fast it updates.)
