Hey Bill -
I haven’t seen the collaboration stuff live yet but I had a similar thought when seeing the release notes - leveraging it to give visibility to not just “Skuid” records but all records.
In the application I’m building, I’ve actually built something like this - users who are viewing a record get notified when someone else edits the record they are viewing. This, in turn, disables any further edits and essentially forces the user to refresh. To be honest, it’s not the most elegant solution (I built it when I was first learning SFDC and before platform caching, etc. features were added) but it gets the job done.
I have plans for a v2 of what I’ve built but I’d love to see a collaboration API exposed by Skuid - lots of great use cases for this and I would be able to focus on application features instead of infrastructure features 
