Has anyone thought about creating an open-source version of this type of product?

That would ensure this "problem" happen in the future -- and you gets lots of brainpower in figuring out how to really improve on the basic theme!

What functionality would you like to see in a great collaborative online editor?

Yep I could like to build a Redis-based project doing this stuff.

I guess it's a start but I don't like graphics, the fact it's full screen, the lack of the chat, when multiple clients are connected I see a strange "refresh" effect like scrolling on the top then returning, and so forth. Does not feel like a solid product with a nice UI currently so I think that before to add more features you should try to improve what you already have.

OT, Is there any start-up that tried free (as in speech) model for SaaS product? It will be selling point, because you don't have to worry about company going out of business or that they decided to move on to something else.

We need a license that will a) protect the developer from competition as long as they're in business and b) protect users from the company killing the product. When devs are not in game anymore, it must be possible for users to run the software themselves and allow others to enter the market (fork the company, not just free software). id Software's approach by frequently releasing old versions of code in Affero GPL might work.

I don't know if they qualify as startups, but here are two examples:

Mint (http://www.haveamint.com) and FogBugz (http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/)

You can buy and self-host these products, with source code included.

Don't broadcast development intentions. That never works well.

I've read http://sivers.org/zipit and when I saw this I instantly thought about it. After that, though, I read the blog, tried out the program, and now I'm not so sure. It seems like it might be something Ben Noland is ready to confidently pursue. Also, I would say that it usually doesn't work well, not that it never works well. I'm not big on absolutes when it comes to things like creativity, business, and motivation.

One thing that makes zipit not apply is that it's already partly a reality in two different ways. First, he has a pretty good prototype, with good branding already. Second, his call to action has actually started some serious interest, from what I can tell. There are quite a few encouraging comments and suggestions here and on his blog, for something that was just announced half a day ago.

Ben, I hope you can bring collabedit to fruition!

Related: http://sivers.org/zipit

Yes, but sometimes timing is everything.

In this case I was looking for feedback, ideas and awareness. Given the state of things, the timing has worked out pretty well.

Wouldn't it be funny if this was exactly what google intended when they shut it down? Surely it helps Wave and future products if a bunch of engineers start building expertise with this type of tech.

You can (as we see) knock up a bare bones copy reasonably easily. The expertise is already out there. I'd say quite a lot of people are working on realtime collaborative comet stuff, and have been for quite a while now.

The hard bit is getting people to use it.

I wrote a fun multiplayer drawing applet (Java) back in 2000, but no one used it :( sob. Actually a few did, it was fun anyway :) One of my points is, this technology is nothing new.

It sounded like a great idea until... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979055

Fortunately, he's a fan of etherpad, so if the open source product is good (might not be-sometimes open sourcing something doesn't work well), he'll be ready to commercialize it. People will still need support and hosting.

You are not alone. I spent hours last night working on my own that's been abandoned for a long time. You are a little ahead of the game right now, and it looks nice!

With the leader out of the way for a while, I can't help but wonder how many of these will pop-up, and how many geeks did the same thing last night :)

Can you please put a video of your product in action (being used by multiple users) on your site please?

Probably not today, but you try it out: http://collabedit.com/display?id=44959

You can also open multiple browser windows if no one else is there.

This is pretty sweet; it seems like a nicer way to do one-off pastebins than current sites.

a forever qualm about online code editor i have is that they don't do automatic indenting properly. I have never used etherpad, i'm not sure how well they did this, but textmate is a good example to model after :D

I agree wholeheartedly. The first thing I noticed with Bespin specifically that STILL hasn't been fixed as far as I can tell from using it for the last few minutes was the lack of auto indentation. It is such an important thing for a code editor. It HAS to be there.

EDIT: I see they added the autoindent setting last March. I still can't for the life of me figure out how to actually enable it. It should be on by default, no question about it.

Yeah, TextMate's auto-identing is very smart and usually perfect at reading my mind. I'd like to see something like that in an online collaboration notepad like this because it's a lot of work to do it manually after using TextMate so much ;-)

Does codemirror's indenting work well for you? I actually really like it.