San Francisco — Google seems to be hurrying to get its holiday shopping done, having just acquired its fourth company in less than a month. In order to boost its recently invited Wave product, Google on Friday said it is buying the San Francisco based online collaboration startup “AppJet,” which makes the EtherPad real-time workgroup collaboration application and merging its technology with an innovative Wave communication platform the Internet giant is creating.
AppJet provides a product that reflects certain features of Google Wave, only since it has been around for a little longer, may have one or more legs up.
“AppJet is molded into a group of highly-talented entrepreneurs with deep expertise in real-time web collaboration. Google and AppJet have a commen vision of how web collaboration can benefit users, and we are excited to have the AppJet team contribute to the success of Google Wave,” a Google spokesman said via e-mail on Friday.
“We are glad to announce that AppJet Inc. has been acquired by Google,” AppJet said in a message at its website.
The AppJet team will join the group developing Wave, and will continue its work on real-time collaboration application that Google rolled out in May and that is still in limited availability by invitation only.
EtherPad empowers people at various computers to simultaneously edit documents shared online, with changes instantly reflected on all users’ screens.
AppJet’s EtherPad perfectly matches with Google’s vision of an innovative Wave communications platform that liberates people from the constraints of traditional email.
Existing users are already whining about these plans in comments to the AppJet blog posting. “This is the worst news ever. Google Wave is NOT an alternative to EtherPad. The clean design and, above all, the task specificity of EtherPad makes it vastly superior. I have been using Google Wave for over a month now and it just does not compare to the months of wonderful service and growth from EtherPad. Boo,” wrote one disenchanted EtherPad user.
In September Google started out inviting people to test its Wave messaging platform that merges email, online chat, social networking and “wiki” style group access to Web pages or documents.
“We are still in a screening process and it is still very buggy,” Google Wave product manager Gregory D’Alesandre said last month at an Internet technology conference in San Francisco.
“There are a lot of features yet to be done.”
AppJet launched in December of 2007, and three members of the startup’s five-person team are former Google employees.
EtherPad users who have supplied Appjet with e-mail addresses will receive Google Wave invitations before the end of the year, the company says. But as of today, people would not be able to create any new free public “pads” nor any new EtherPad accounts.
The purchase price was not disclosed, but unconfirmed online reports place the figure around $10 million.
Google’s other acquisitions this year include On2, reCAPTCHA, AdMob, Gizmo5, and Teracent.
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