How Figma took Sketch's market share with realtime collaboration

When Figma arrived with multiplayer editing back in 2016, it wasn't at all obvious it would be successful - in fact, designers kind of hated the idea of "hovering art directors". Fast forward to 2023, and designers can't imagine another way.

Inspired by the success of Figma and fuelled by the shift to remote-first, many applications like Notion and Miro now offer realtime collaborative spaces, enabling teams to communicate and collaborate in the same place. It's not just a better user experience - when executed to a high standard, realtime collaboration can be a leading contributor to product-led growth as well. In this video, Alex from Ably (‪@bookercodes‬) sits down with a product leader in the realtime collaboration space to explore the challenges implementing realtime features, as well as how to overcome them in any codebase, regardless of of what technology stack you're using (with the right tools, it might be easier than you think!)

TIMESTAMPS ⏰
00:00 Introduction
00:49 Figma vs. Sketch
03:04 Expert opinion
04:46 Realtime collaboration and PLG
05:44 Challenges implementing realtime collaboration
06:47 Introducing Spaces
09:12 Spaces demo
13:00 Code
15:26 The Ably dream
16:54 How to get started

ABOUT ABLY 👋
Ably is an enterprise-grade pub/sub messaging platform. We make it easy to efficiently design, quickly ship, and seamlessly scale critical realtime functionality delivered directly to end-users. Every day, we deliver billions of realtime messages to millions of users for thousands of companies.

ABOUT ABLY SPACES 🚀
Spaces enables you to build collaborative environments in your application. It provides high-level APIs for managing the data related to members collaborating synchronously in an application, such as their online status, or the position of their cursors. This is also known as participant state. Each API is optimized based on the payload structure and frequency of updates that are anticipated for that feature.

LINKS 🔗
SIGN UP TO ABLY https://ably.com/
READ MORE ABOUT SPACES https://ably.com/docs/products/spaces

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