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By Chris Meadows

I’ve mentioned EtherPad here before—the simple collaborative text editor that made collaboration as easy as passing your partner a URL.

Since Google Wave, Google’s confusing new collaboration service, was created, I and many others have remarked elsewhere on how superior to Google Wave EtherPad is. It has epic simplicity, it has user-friendliness, it has different-color highlighting for users, it has no need for a login account.

Google apparently took notice—because as TechCrunch announced today, Google has bought AppJet, the company behind EtherPad, for a sum that TechCrunch says was “in the low eight figures”. A number of AppJet’s executives are former Google staffers.

As a result, EtherPad has stopped accepting new customers or allowing the creation of new public pads, and will be closing down existing pads at the end of March, 2010.

On the bright side, this means that the people responsible for the best multi-user collaboration experience ever will be joining the Google Wave team—so hopefully Wave’s user interface will improve.

But the downside is that there is no way Wave will be able to offer all of the benefits EtherPad did—such as the ability to join without needing to create an account anywhere. At the moment, you need an account to join Wave at all, though AppJet will be sending invitations to registered EtherPad users by the end of December.

 
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