Online Observations

Best free collaboration tool

If you thought that Google Docs is cool when it allows multiple people to edit a document at the same time, you will be surprised to know that it doesn’t even show updates in real time. But here’s a tool that shows Google Docs how it is done. It is called Etherpad. This neat little tool does allows you to have any number of coordinators on a single text document and shows you changes made to the document in real time. I foresee a very neat use of this already: imagine a client telecon, where there are a number of your colleagues present and all are trying to take notes. A tool like this would be awesome, because then everyone can take these notes collaboratively in real time, and add to each others comments.

(Click image to enlarge).

It may not have the best UI in the world, but it is certainly one of the most functional piece of software around. And its simple. I don’t even need to create a login to be able to use this. All I do is click on a button, get a unique URL, and share the URL with all the people I need to collaborate on this piece of text.

What’s more, I can chat as well on the side. It also allows you to save versions of the document which you can recover later. I think its neat – a very handy tool which can be setup in a jiffy and is very simple to use. Just what you need in a collaboration tool. I think they should be integrated into something like a freeconference.com or a gotomeeting.com service.