Google Acquires JotSpot - What JotSpot Brings to the Table
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Just in case you haven’t heard of them, wikis are web pages that anyone can write and edit. The most famous is Wikipedia, which, like an online encyclopedia, tries to cover just about everything and is open to nearly anyone to edit (with certain restrictions). There are many other wikis, such as Wookiepedia (which is focused on the Star Wars universe), Wikitravel (for tourists), wikiHow (for do-it-yourselfers and the curious), and so on. Their usage of user-generated content makes them about as Web 2.0 as it gets.
JotSpot’s wiki tools are a little different. It offers a series of online productivity software programs that provide users with many of the same functions found in programs such as Microsoft Word or Excel. That’s right, you can use word processing, spread sheets, to-do lists, and many other applications that are web-enabled. I admit that I’m judging this mostly from JotSpot’s blog; the company has put a hold on new sign-ups for its software until it completes the six-mile move from its own headquarters to Google’s. But the interface looks very intuitive, and when it comes to creating collaborative web pages, users can do a lot more with JotSpot’s applications than they could if they were editing, say, Wikipedia. They can even keep their wikis private, to be shared with only certain very specific people (as the U.S. intelligence community does for its own recently-announced wikis).
It’s worth pointing out that Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer filed a patent application near the beginning of 2006 related to wikis. It’s titled “Collaborative web page authoring” and describes “A method for sending an e-mail message to a web page, comprising: receiving a user-entered e-mail message containing an address associated with a destination web page; identifying the destination web page; extracting at least a portion of the e-mail message; adding content to the destination web page based on the extracted…portion of the e-mail message; and publishing the destination web page containing the added content.” The patent also includes a method of authenticating the information.
The application itself is a very long read, but includes an excellent number and assortment of features. The system described features editable pages; WYSIWYG editing; attachments to pages; revision control; dynamic tables and calendars; the ability to place data from multiple sources onto a page (it looks like you can even use RSS feeds for this); and easily customized and modified pages. In short, it seems to deliver on Kraus and Spencer’s original idea of bringing wikis to everyone.
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