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No doubt Google Docs is a suite of products that do many things, from word processing to spreadsheets to document management. One thing that Google Docs does not do is real-time collaborative text editing. This is what Etherpad is all about.

Currently Etherpad is a FREE online service. In the free versions, pads are secured by creating unique and non-guessable URLs. Only people who know the URL to your pad will be able to access its contents. In this way, you can control access to a pad. You can think of the randomly-generated URL as a sort of password.

Etherpad is fully supported by IE 6+, Safari 3+, and FireFox 2+ browsers.  Unfortunately Etherpad does not support rich-text formating, thus you can only edit plain old text.

Realtime collaborative text editing with Etherpad.