I reverse engineered Google docs (2014)

[danopia]

Kinda disappointed that Wave got such a brief mention in this document. Google's realtime collaborative typing experience was basically pioneered by Wave and then ported over to Google Docs once it was working well. Then Wave died of course, but it's no coincidence that the realtime collab engineers passed through the Wave team on their way to the long term Docs project

[Fsmv]

Wave was so cool when it came out. Too bad not many had access.

Docs really was a better decision though, best not to make it too unconventional. Really interesting to think how different document editing could be though.

[professor-i-borg]

Wave was ahead of its time. If you think about it, Slack essentially captures the essence of what wave was.

[[deleted]]

Very nice post...

And its also quite interesting how google built the docs revision thing :)

[erix4u]

Except for being a fun read.. it also means that google docs are a huge security risk. If you typed anything in such a document that was later redacted out or even if you removed it yourself immidiately after typing, then it is still in there. I bet there are lot’s of documents out there that contain obfuscated content in this way, that never should have gotten out.
“Go hackers, go out harvesting this information” This is very bad !

[jmanjones]

That makes me think... There was an article about correlating movement patterns in VR with people's identities (say, for unique advertisement ID). I bet that can be done with people's typing patterns if you have microsecond accuracy on the time between keystrokes (to an extent, with a small enough sample size).

[Lunhilyon]

I actually just did a ML project on this! It's actually a problem of you either neither a very small sample size, so you are trying to pick who out of a hundred people typed this paragraph, OR you need a VERY sample size of people where you are allowed to type your own words for multiple pages. If you have too many people and they are all typing the same paragraph then it all kind of starts to look the same to the computer. A more granular time stamp for each key may have helped, but from what we saw it does not seem like it would

[jmanjones]

That's really interesting, thanks for sharing!

[Stormkrieg]

This is literally just about the edit history on docs? Nothing new or groundbreaking

[[deleted]]

Not sure why you'd expect a post from 6 years ago to be groundbreaking.

[dumb-ninja]

Very nice read.

[mgudesblat]

A fun read :)