Metropol

Just been sent this by a friend. Basically it's a multi-user real-time version of notepad. You hit "new pad" and send whoever the URL of it, and you can both edit it simultaneously. Very handy for collaboration.

Here's one now! http://etherpad.com/Q2gAWUGS3b43s

Cool but what's the difference between it and Google Docs?

Presumably the fact that it's so completely ad-hoc - after all functionally it's not even almost on par with Google Docs - but for so many things that just won't matter.

Well there's already one advantage from my happy testing which is that it doesn't seem to get annoying edit conflict popups.

I've started using this as a sort of notes-to-my-self thingy, I made an easy to remember forwarding address on my webspace that takes me straight to the etherpad.

What the hell, this service is closing next month and will become part of Google Wave or some such.

Cue all the reasons I fucking hate google docs to begin with. Presumably this will be the end of "here's a link - just start editing with me" and the start of "make a google account, make a wave account, share this document, piss about, and find it doesn't work properly anyway".

What stupidly annoying news.