Another One (about to) Bite(s) the Dust

Bye Bye TitanPad

I’ve written this kind of post before — the feeling of loss when a favorite technology site announces it is closing up shop. I guess I should be grateful the announcements even happen.

The latest is TitanPad — a powerful collaborative document tool that I have used with many other people over the years, mostly for collaborative poetry. TitanPad was built out of a wave of other collaborative document makers from the roots of Etherpad and Google’s acquisition of a key element of open collaborative document makers, but I liked it for the simplicity and for the way it archived every keystroke, turning the static document into something you could watch unfold like a movie.

Here is a collaborative poem from this past summer’s Connected Learning MOOC:

I know there are add-ons in Google Docs and a host of other sites that do much of what TitanPad has done and I appreciate that the programmers (who reasonably cite changes in web browsers, underlying code and issues of privacy as rationale for pulling the plug) are doing a “graceful shutdown” so that people can make decisions about their work. No more new pads after May and then by the end of 2017, the site will be gone.

I’ve always thought of the collaboration we have unfolding in TitanPad to be mostly temporary writing, sometimes captured beyond the pad in other ways (such as with video and audio), so I don’t even have many links to past work I have done with others to save, even if I wanted to.

The programmers helpfully point to a resource that has “sites similar to” TitanPad, which might be useful. I’ve bookmarked that resource, and hope that my bookmarking tool doesn’t fade away on me, too. (I’ve had that happen …)

Peace (shared),
Kevin

 

2 Comments
  1. What we need to do here is teach ourselves or find somebody to teach us how to grab open source code off Git Hub and create our own instantiations of Ethernet there. Have you checked out sandstorm.io? It could be installed or you can use their sandbox to share.

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