I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it.
Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in classes where students write papers, because now you can finally "show your work" in writing the way you do in math.
I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back
You often talk about releasing early, building something people want, etc. Since you carry a lot of influence, and (I guess) invest in Etherpad, and they've adjusted it to your personal request - do you worry that this effect might give you a distorted view of how well Etherpad specifically, and YC startups generally, are building what people want?
Look at the attention this is getting Etherpad. I'm pretty sure this was a pretty high ROI day of work!
To further drive that thought home, my company hereby offers to add any 1-day-effort feature request made by any popular tech figure, provided they're willing to share our work with their audience. (Sites for those would be http://bug.gd or http://www.yumbunny.com or any other site in my profile.)
Seriously, they'd be silly not to have taken pg up on this even if he wasn't helping to back them.
Convincing someone of something you believe in and abusing your influence are two very different things.
I don't think pg implied that he bullied them into implementing this, only that he talked them into it. And I can't imagine that YC would last long if pg got into the habit of bullying its start-ups into implementing his personal requests.
Valid point, but I think it's worth looking at the potential benefits. The thing I always hate about writing is that I'm constantly saving copies off to the side. At the very least I would think snapshots would be invaluable, but once you have playback, you basically already have snapshots with high granularity.
While solutions like DropBox or Sharepoint allow versioning and collaboration it's at a higher level. Maybe I've been spoiled by VMWare, but I love having branches of specific versions to fall back on and test things out. Why should writing be any different?
This is an incredible thing to watch! Can you do this with any piece of writing on Etherpad?
What a great way of bringing attention to a start-up: make something that's inherently fascinating due to features. This is unlike anything online I've seen before because the functionality just doesn't exist anywhere else. So it's a great thing to watch and it also tells you about the service.
I like that you keep constantly going back to eliminate unnecessary language. Something tells me that's the first and most obvious trait of watching good writers write: at the governor's school, when the writers would write on paper instead of on the computer, you could read a draft and see that emerging pattern of phrase after phrase, each building on the last. It's interesting seeing it happen on the computer.
Can you do this with any piece of writing on Etherpad?
Anything you write with it now you will be able to play back like this soon. Etherpad is already saving all the keystrokes. They just haven't released the player yet. (This is a one-off prototype.)
This site shows how some fairly good illustrations are drawn (brushstroke playback). Unfortunately, not all drawings can be animated and the ability to search for playback-capable drawings is limited:
It would be interesting to have the timestamp data (if it is recorded) of the keystrokes (adjusted to author's timezone - privacy withstanding) so you can see a clock/calendar [day|night icon] when the author wrote it (was it 3am in the morning? did they put it aside for a couple hours or was it a period of days?).
However, it should be somewhere hidden and available only if people really want to be able to replay. Else it is going to be an over kill on their servers.
This is great, and the article itself is excellent. Regarding "going back to eliminate unnecessary language", as Stephen King said, "2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%".
Might I suggest, from the watcher's perspective, it'd be handy if the final feature sets the vertical scrollbar such that the currently playing change is on the screen?
It might be kind of jerky during the editing stage, but it's better than scrolling around trying to find out where the action is. ;)
What I learned from this is that I write very differently from the way you do. My first draft is almost straight stream of consciousness, and then I go back and reread and edit several times. You seem to make several attempts at each sentence before finding one you like, and then edit the whole thing.
Of course, I may just not realize how I actually write, since I don't have a playback of anything of length to watch.
What I'd really be interested in watching is some famous programmers working on code with this kind of playback. Not sure if it'd actually be enlightening, but it would be fun to experiment with.
I really liked this sentence I caught. "Launching lets you observe the collision between your presuppositions and the needs of actual users."
I know, every word should tell, but I wish it had made it.
That feature is neat and gives insight into the way people write. Would be just as interesting to see a playback of versioned source code files in SVN / CVS..
That would be an amazing training tool. I have learnt the most by observing great engineers code, than reading tons of material. It just strikes at you the way they fork functions, how they name variables, logic, the way they would cut out/undo unnecessary statements and combine them to optimize code. It just reflects the way good programmers think when they code.
If this were only available when you guys were writing code for Viaweb, and when you were writing On Lisp -- what a wonderful thing it would be to learn from. It would show the thought process behind what went into writing what you wrote!
"I doubt everyone will abandon their word processing software and user Etherpad."
They will probably give up Word for something, eventually. Especially among the current generation, writing is something done online; a blog, an email, a tweet, writing on someone's wall. At some point, it stops making sense to have a word processor distinct from the web. Right now, Word has more features that people like than online writing tools, but that will change over time. Online writing tools are a more natural fit for collaboration and integration with words' final destinations.
Microsoft could make the online tool that replaces Word, but it is probably too dangerous to their current revenue stream. I don't think they can get the same revenue for an online version of Word, and it would be difficult for them to rationalize trying a new business model that may never regain the revenue they get now.
(And yes, I'm basically just making the Innovator's Dilemma argument for word processors.)
Going off of the "show your work" idea, is it possible to analyze the writing style to prove that it was -you- who wrote it? Or is there too much variation? There was a bad episode of Numb3rs where they used someone's "typing profile" to identify someone, so it just got me thinking :)
If high-resolution timestamps for each keystroke aren't too much of a burden it seems like this would be straightforward to implement, given an algorithm like BioPassword's.
It looks like BioPassword works best on short, often repeated phrases like login names and passwords. I'm not sure how it would work for larger, unpracticed blocks of text. Etherpad would also need to store information about the timing of when each key is pressed, and based on the demo it doesn't look like they're doing that.
There are already non-webapp mouselog/keylog and replay applications. And besides, think of the implications of letting students be on the internet while they are writing essays.
It's different when it's built into a generic, web-based editor. Imagine the difference between
a) telling students to install a keylogger, write an essay with it turned on, then submit the essay plus the logs, and then the teacher figuring out how to replay the logs, versus
b) telling students to write their essay at etherpad.com, they submit the url, teacher clicks on "replay."
As for the matter of students being online, that's going to have to get solved anyway, because all the apps are moving online.
I think that pendulum has almost reached the end of it's arc. There are a number of trends that are starting to pull in the opposite direction. From concerns about privacy and security to the proliferation of mobile computing, intermittent disconnection from the cloud has it's uses.
Tools like Google Gears and the continued blurring of the line between desktop applications and web applications mean that it's easy to build applications where being connected enhances the experience considerably, but the essential functions are still there even if the network goes away.
"There are a number of trends that are starting to pull in the opposite direction. From concerns about privacy and security"
Ironically I think it's the tech crowd/geeks (us) who are most resistant to webapps. We can see the privacy,security,reliability issues. The average users however, cannot. They're already embracing webapps.
That might actually be evidence that the pendulum has almost reached the end of its arc. The tech crowd first embraced the web just as average users were embracing the PC. Windows 95 was the first really usable version of Windows, and it was also the year of Netscape's IPO. Mainstream users adopt last decade's technology just as the early adopters are finding a new playground.
The big question is what's next. I'm guessing it'll be mobile - the geeks are embracing it just as the mainstream is finally becoming comfortable with last decade's technology. But it's a bit too early to tell.
There are pendulums in fashion, but not, as far as I know, in technology. If you get pendulum-like behavior for a cycle, you have to assume it's a coincidence.
Cheating is a difficult and important problem, but I'm not sure this solution would be worth the inconvenience it would cause. If it only inconvenienced cheaters that would be fine -- but I think it would also cause some honest students and teachers a lot of trouble.
First, there's the simple privacy issue. If a professor told me to install a keylogger on my computer or if she told me to use etherpad to write an essay - either way I'd feel like my privacy was being violated.
Then there's the practical issue of how this system would affect writing ability. I personally do my best writing when I'm able to ignore the critic in my head and focus on the words. Being self-conscious about someone seeing all the stupid things I wrote along the way would make it much more difficult to get into this state of concentration.
Finally, there's the issue of making teacher's not only read two dozen boring essays but also watch replays of them being written. I personally think their time could be better spent.
One thing that I'd find problematic with that is the inability to unplug to write. There are a lot of tasks (and as I recall you said the same in one of your essays) that I find I concentrate better with the internet unjacked.
'Letting' students use the internet while they're writing essays? I think I'm missing something. I've never written an essay anywhere but on a computer with regular stuff around, including a web browser, etc.
script -t 2> script.demo.time script.demo
xemacs -nw
# M-x tetris
# ; play tetris now
# C-x C-c ; exit emacs
exit
# watch tetris being played:
scriptreplay script.demo.time script.demo
script can create a "screencast" of any terminal session. This works pretty well, but probably is not the right solution for the education market pg is talking about :-)
Indeed, I've written all of my posts on a combination of Darkroom and Etherpad. Etherpad lets me involve a couple editors who can make copy edits and suggestions while I'm still the draft.
Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in classes where students write papers, because now you can finally "show your work" in writing the way you do in math.