Seems unlikely. It's awfully difficult to integrate an acquisition like EtherPad so quickly. I've read that they've been working on a real-time architecture from the ground up for a while. Plus, I think the Etherpad team joined Wave, not Docs.

It's related to acquisitions in a different way. That was mostly an attempt to put Docs(Writely) and Spreadsheets on as much common infrastructure as possible.

You will remember that the original versions of these products were independently developed and then acquired by Google.

Still haven't seen the results, but I assume they threw in a few features on the way also. Docs had seen no interesting additions in quite a while despite the very capable team. So now it is coming out of maintenance mode and will hopefully add features and stay relatively responsive.

It does seem like they integrated the faster refresh rate so you can see what your collaborators are doing in real time rather than every 10 seconds.

This was one of the features of EtherPad that the EtherPad team considered "a hard problem."

I think it's more likely these are the results of the Neil Fraser acquisition: http://neil.fraser.name/news/2006/11/01/

No, not in any way. I believe the techs are unrelated.

However, it's nice that google puts this up 2 days before they take Etherpad down. I'd be lost without it.

It might be that Google Wave thing.