Etherpad Collaborative Tool

Over the weekend I came across this great collaborative tool, Etherpad, and invited a few people via Twitter to give it a test run so we did. Unlike a wikispace or Google Doc multiple people can record their thoughts at the same time in real time and it worked a treat. Each person was able to quickly change their username to someone we could relate to and then begin typing away. As we typed we could see in real time what the other people were typing. Each person typed in a different colour so we could see who was writing what.Image When we  had finished you could save the whole thing as a saved revision text file sort of thing that you could copy into another more fixed document. It could be particularly useful for note-taking, where participants could help each other to record pertinent points or for a group to collaborate to build a document in real time.

Unfortunately it has now gone into closed beta testing because demand exceeded the load their servers could bear but worth waiting for I think.