Etherpad, a web based word-processor that allows multiple users to collaborate online in real time, announced last week that it had been purchased by Google and was to close immediately.

Unsurprisingly, this caused a great deal of consternation amongst educators who had been using Etherpad or, like me, were planning to use Etherpad in lessons that very week!

This proves Google is evil! was the immediate reaction among many of us who were rightly disappointed at the sudden takeover and the apparent decision by Google to close down Etherpad.

Google was clearly intent on stifling any form of competition to its new Google Wave service and that was clearly the reason for this most evil of moves.

Perhaps not so. It later transpired that Etherpad had been listening to its users’ concerns and immediately decided to re-open the service and keep it open for the foreseeable future – one must assume with the beneplacit of evil Google.

As I have already hinted, none of the following was particularly surprising to me: the fact that a growing and successful company like Google would gobble up a smaller rival, the accusations levelled against Google’s intentions or, indeed, the level of protestation that erupted from Etherpad’s users.

I did find it surprising to read, however, that given the fact that Etherpad was a free service, its users had therefore no right to protest against its closure, implying, in my view, that those of us using services like Etherpad were free loaders who are only interested in a freebie.

I felt this missed the point entirely. The assumption that Etherpad is free is wrong. I am not referring to the fact that Etherpad is was following a revenue model called freemium, which is working well for other free apps such as Evernote and, increasingly, Spotify, for example.

Those of us using these apps are not simply using them: we are talking about them, we are blogging about them, we are getting our colleagues to use them and, I suspect, most importantly to the likes of Google, we are getting our students to use them.

If you follow or, indeed, agree with this rhetoric, we can then almost surmise that it is we who are doing the work for free. We have pointed thousands of users towards Etherpad and, as Evernote can attest, these apps only need a relatively small proportion of premium users to make the service profitable.

If you think about it, Etherpad’s new owner, Google, is well aware of all this. Google makes its living by offering free services with the only aim of attracting huge amounts of users to whom Google can then show their customers’ adverts and sell their premium services.

My dad used to tell me stories of free cigarettes being given away by tobacco companies outside the school gates to pupils on the way home. Google’s strategy surrounding free web apps for education is very similar: hook’em while they’re young.

I am not blind to the fact that comparing Google’s tactics to those of tobacco companies is a tad unfair. We must admit, however, that the desired outcome is the same: to get young people conditioned to using a product form an early age.

Personally, I have no great moral objection to this so long as Google Docs, for example – or any other web app for that matter, continues to be a useful tool for education.

However, educators must not be blind to the fact that, by promoting these tools among our fellow educators and among our students, we are not using them for free: we are, in fact, driving potential customers towards these applications in droves, which to them is priceless.

So no, web applications are not free. They just appear to be.

Post photo by Neubie – Cover photo by DavidDMuir

This post is tagged etherpad, google, views and opinions, web 2.0, web applications