TitanPad

» see titanpad.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A pad was a web address you sent to four people so that all five of you could type into the same document at the same time, watching each other's cursors move, with no account required from anybody. In 2010 that was a strange thing to be handed for free, and a new one. Etherpad had invented it, AppJet had built Etherpad, and Google bought AppJet in December 2009 and gave the service an abrupt closing notice.

Google did at least open-source the code on the way out. On 14 April 2010 etherpad.com disabled new pad creation, and that same day Michael Prokop posted a note under the heading EtherPad.com gone, long live titanpad.com. He and Christian Hofstädtler and some friends had taken the released code and stood up their own instance. The stated purpose was plain: an Etherpad setup unrelated to any commercial or political entity, kept running properly.

It worked for seven years. TitanPad handed out named subdomains so a group could keep its pads together, and it charged nobody anything. Read the comments left under its farewell post and you get the user base without having to guess at it: an EFL teacher, a master's seminar in Toulouse, students in Bogotá using it for digital humanities work and for organizing, a group in Barcelona who signed off with the word solidaritat, songwriters who liked watching a lyric grow in the revision timeline.

My own university years had finished by the time it launched, and in Turkey the collaborative document in that period was a Google one, because a Gmail account was something everyone already had. TitanPad belonged to the people who specifically wanted the opposite of that.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fork that never caught ~

When the TitanPad team wrote its goodbye, the reasoning was technical and unusually honest, so it is worth setting out. After Google released the Etherpad source, the community rewrote it in Node.js as etherpad-lite, and the original became known as etherpad-legacy. The rewrite was cleaner but missing features. The legacy code had the features and no maintainer.

Six years later, in late 2016, nothing about that had changed. etherpad-lite still lacked what they needed and etherpad-legacy was still unmaintained, which meant TitanPad was running a popular public service on an application nobody was patching. They put it carefully in the post: the risk an unmaintained application poses is non-negligeable, and compounded by the success of TitanPad.com. Success made the exposure worse.

~ fourteen months of notice ~

They addressed the obvious question directly, because the comment thread was full of people offering to pay. The running costs could have been covered by crowdfunding, they wrote, and they said so plainly. What money could not buy was a fix for the application code, which nobody could easily repair, and without steady development the project was unsustainable. The underlying technologies of the web keep moving, and TitanPad could not be kept up to standard.

So they chose the exit nobody chooses. On 12 November 2016 they announced a shutdown fourteen months out, with pads going read-only on 1 May 2017 and the site closing on 31 December. The alternative was waiting for a browser update to break the thing without warning and losing everyone's documents on a Tuesday.

~ what the comments say ~

The farewell post is still up on Blogger and the thread under it is the best thing left of the service. Teachers in Spain and in Colombia. Community organizers describing pads as the place a campaign got written. One commenter recalled drafting a business plan on the original EtherPad in 2009 inside six hours with collaborators spread from Dresden to China. Several offered to fund it, and one left an email address and said simply, please do not shut down.

Archive Team lists TitanPad's status as Lost. The pads are not in the Wayback Machine in any meaningful way, because a pad is a live document behind a URL and a crawler sees an empty editor. Seven years of seminar notes and campaign drafts and co-written songs went out with the lights. The sign-off on the announcement was: best wishes from all of us, and thanks for all the pads.

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