I'd love to see the pitch Stypi gave to get accepted into YC. It looks like a great product - but I'd be interested to know what market of users Stypi will be making happy that aren't already serviced by Google Docs, etherpad, Apache Wave etc.
The OT technology that powers stuff like this is interesting but is being rapidly commoditized by JS libraries (check out the awesome ShareJS http://sharejs.org/ for an example). So what makes these guys interesting hopefully isn't the tech itself, but the market they want to bring it to.
Certainly can't imagine it would replace source control - it would be incredibly frustrating having other devs break your codebase all the time, you'd be debugging all their mistakes as well as yours, and as a team we'd be disincentives from making any big changes since it would halt anyone else's work while the change is being worked on.
There's a reason we create abstractions like commits and branches, and don't all just work from a share drive.
Our team started with Etherpad, added a real-time collaborative grid similar to Google Spreadsheets, multiple tabs, integrated full-text Lucene search (indexed immediately), spellcheck, file browser, permissions system, automated time estimates, element insertion, a special script print format, and teleprompter output. I guess I am jealous that we never got interviewed by a hot chick in a fancy high-rise.
Anyway I am wondering, did they use the regular Java/appjet Etherpad, or is it based on the node.js Etherpad Lite?
Also Google Wave wasn't really about collaborative text editing.
It was more about a generic framework for developers that used operational transforms to enable collaborative manipulation of all types of content or objects. But people didn't get that.
"There is also a chance that the AP could adopt it (if they are smart)"