I love Hackpad. And it's strange because most of what Hackpad does, Google Docs does. And I really like Google Docs. I use Google Docs dozens of times a day.
But there is something about Hackpad that I like better than Google Docs for massively open online realtime document creation. Let's not turn that into an acronym please.
Yesterday, we created this document on Hackpad. And I embedded it on AVC. You could sit there and watch people from all around the world entering stuff into it, taking stuff out, commenting, adding things, etc. You could see when the folks in asia woke up and started entering in asian companies.
Wikipedia showed the power of the crowd to come together and co-create (peer produce) information. I truly believe the result is better, even if it can be a bit messy at the edges.
The document we created yesterday is also messy. I am trying to decide if I should clean it up. There is a bunch of stuff in that document that I would like to remove, that I don't think belongs there. I might do that in a day or two and then lock it down for now. Or I may not. Haven't decided yet. As my friend Peter said to me over email this morning, it is a great "crib sheet". If you have thoughts or suggestions on that decision, please leave them in the comments for me.
But regardless of how that decision goes down, I would like to thank the Hackpad team for creating an amazing product. We put it through the paces yesterday and it came through like a champ.
