Comments on: Tokbox & Etherpad: Potential Google Wave Competitors, Available Now

By: Random Surfer

Random Surfer — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:42:19 +0000

I guess this post must maintain a canonical copy or at least a mention at Google Wave Alternative.

By: Arnie Widdowson

Arnie Widdowson — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:00:41 +0000

My prediction is that wave will not be the collaborative platform of the future. It will be popular and a buzz filled curiosity, but the future lies in graphical whiteboards with GUI’s, rich media and webcams. Applications for use in whiteboards will provide (via GUI’s) acres of organized space for media rich collaborative development ( and a new class of programming). Further, as design time occurs at run time, collaborative application development -in situ- will be possible. Wave as the transport level maybe, but not the presentation.

By: Mamainak

Mamainak — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:21:57 +0000

I saw that Digsby uses TokBox and while I talked to my friend on facebook (via Digsby) she could see my webcam – I still don’t know how! (she didn’t use Digsby…)

By: admkenshin

admkenshin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:24:46 +0000

You are missing one very important thing however… If you use Etherpad, all those you communicate with must use it as well. It’s not an open standard. Google Wave is, in fact, a third party client server implementation is already available. With wave, Google users can chat with Yahoo! Wave users, and perhaps even MS MicroWave (:D), unless MS decides to make their own standard again. It will truly be a possible replacement for the venerated email.

By: andrei

andrei — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:12:50 +0000

No sort of desktop sharing, i guess…?
It is nice to highlight something together with my team, but what i would really use is a way to show what i am doing on my PC or look at theirs (like NetMeeting or web services like Webex)

By: Debbie

Debbie — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:17:16 +0000

I used tokbox to do 4 2-hour presentations to business clients about 3 months ago. The basic video conferencing function worked great. The Slideshare integration worked well enough, with minor glitches. The Youtube integration worked, except when it didn’t – which in my experience meant that 3 of the 10 videos I tried to show across all 4 conferences didn’t play. I can’t complain about something that’s free, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending tokbox for anything really important unless they’ve made some major improvements in reliability in the past couple of months.

By: Blake Elias

Blake Elias — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:54:56 +0000

Wow, these apps look great! Etherpad seems to add the most value here since IM and video chat already exist, albeit in a slightly less convenient form than Tokbox.

I would hardly say that they do all that Google Wave is supposed to do: you would be able to check your inbox for newly updated waves, while in Etherpad I don’t see a way to do that. Anybody would be able to start a Wave with anyone else, but in Etherpad they either have to be allowed access to your team site with an account or password, otherwise it would all be on a public URL. And, of course, how would the person you want to talk with know what URL to go to?…you have to email or IM it to them. Google Wave is supposed to replace email and push the messages to people.

But for small/medium projects with a clearly defined group of participants, this is a great replacement for email/IM/wiki.

Finally, Tokbox looks great when used with Etherpad, but Google Wave is supposed to integrate the multimedia as well. Here the video is separate from the “pad”.