More interactive user collaboration?

This is really out of my reach as a beginner Elgg developer, but I would love to see easy to user real-time collaborative features in elgg.

I had a look at the Etherpad-lite and various webinar solutions, but all of them require a quite complex install that isn't possible on most shared hosting solutions. Besides that (except for the etherpad-lite plugin) they are all quite external from the regular Elgg features.

I had a look around the web, and while this seems to be a complex topic, there seem to be a few potential open-source solutions.

Most promising seemed this framework: http://opencoweb.org/

It already has some cool reference implementations: http://ec2-54-242-10-23.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8080/cowebx-apps/

And can be run via java or python client side (not sure how easy to set-up these though).

But a more low handing fruit might be this: http://www.firepad.io/ which integrates with a more fully featured but not open-source cloud system (which is free to use for small sites).

Anyone had a look at this before or is working on a plugin by any chance?