Live, syncronous text editing…

For some time, I’ve been pining for a cross-platform version of SubEthaEdit. MoonEdit did not seem to catch fire, but recently a few new services like JotSpot Live and Writely have popped up.
Now, what Roland describes as an “open source SubEthaEdit for Perl and PHP” — SynchroEdit:

SynchroEdit is a browser-based simultaneous multiuser editor, a form of same-time, different-place groupware. It allows multiple users to edit a single web-based document at the same time, and it continuously synchronizes all changes so that users always have the same version.
SynchroEdit’s main editor is fully WYSIWYG, dynamically displaying bolds, italics, underlines, strikethroughs, with various justifications, indents and listing styles as an author inputs them. SynchroEdit also supports a simple, text-only editor for more basic documents. To clarify the multiuser experience, the editor window clearly depicts every user’s changes in a specific color and also marks where each user is currently editing with a colored flag listing the user’s name.

Still early days, but this space is heating up. I’ve had a number of instructors ask me about tools with just this functionality — I think we’re going to be having some live-text swingin’parties very soon.