« Map Mashup | Main | Tracing the Evolution of Social Software »
JotSpot: Application Wiki
Joe Kraus, one of the co-founders of Excite, and new blogger has long been rumored to be working on a new wiki tool. Today at the Web 2.0 conference Joe finally unveiled JotSpot, a new type of wiki that they have named an "Application Wiki". JotSpot appears to be not only an advanced wiki, but it also moves the predominantly text-based wiki toward being able to handle structured data and web application development.
At the JotSpot website there is an page on How JotSpot is Different and an Advanced Tour of this wiki's database capabilities.
Better, however, is a demonstration that Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer gave InfoWorld reporter Jon Udell an early demo of JotSpot, which Jon screen-captured and has released as a 23-minute, 32MB Flash presentation. This demo is very impressive: in addition to incremental improvements to wiki, such as WYSIWYG editing, email support, indexed attachments, RSS and web page importing, etc. Kraus and Spencer also demonstrate a very powerful forms templating interface that is very much like creating HTML forms with Javascript, and demonstrated integration with a SalesForce.com web application using SOAP. It appears that JotSpot leverages the unstructured and adhoc advantages that are a strength of wiki, yet allows structure to be added later such that the data in the wiki can be integrated with other non-wiki applications.
The discussion during the demo is also very interesting. Jon Udell made an observation about JotSpot entering into Lotus Notes territory, and Kraus and Spencer discuss how JotSpot makes web application development more accessible, and expressed their desire to create a marketplace for small developers to create tools using JotSpot.
From what I've seen so far, JotSpot looks like it may the first of a third-generation of wikis, the first being the very simple wikis such as Ward Cunningham's C2 Wiki, and second generation being database-backed wikis such as Wikipedia and SocialText. If you are serious about wiki, I highly recommend you take a look at this demo.
Joe Kraus also announced today that they have received a $5.2M funding round from Redpoint and Mayfield, both top VC firms.
More information:
Posted on October 7, 2004 at 12:39 AM in Social Software, User Interface, Web/Tech, Wiki | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/14990/1209152
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference JotSpot: Application Wiki:
» Blogo-talk of the day : JotSpot from Occam's Razor
At least 20 different blog coverage on Joe Kraus new venture: Jotspot. The most complet posting is from my old friend Jeff Clavier with a pretty complete summary, and the one from Christopher Allen with a good pointer to a [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 7, 2004 1:17:46 AM
» Wiki Macros Are a Key Component of the Web Platform from Olivier Travers
Christopher Allen has a good summary about the wiki application that can't decide whether it's called Jot or JotSpot but already raised $5.2M (they must have taken branding lessons from us at MarketingFoxOnSpeed (sorry for the insider joke). Anyway, he... [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 7, 2004 10:57:47 AM
» The Changing Face of Wiki from SocialTwister
I have to admit I've never really liked Wiki technology, but I'm not opposed to it. For some time I have been observing and commenting on the merits of different collabication (collaboration-communication) mediums including blogs, wikis, IM, e-mail and... [Read More]
Tracked on Feb 20, 2006 7:30:19 PM
Comments
An article in spanish: http://www.error500.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=997
Posted by: Antonio at Oct 7, 2004 1:51:54 PM
Hi,
If you like the notion of Application Wikis, you should have a look at the open source project XWiki.. It includes not only a form engine but also a programming API inside wiki pages as well as un underlying relational database..
Ludovic
Posted by: Ludovic Dubost at Oct 7, 2004 4:25:09 PM
Thanks for the wriet up Christopher. I think you asked for a beta. We're trying to provision accounts as rapidly as we can (while making sure that things are scaling ok). I should be able to guarantee you get provisioned in the next 2-3 days. If there any questions I can answer, don't hesitate to ask.
Posted by: Joe Kraus at Oct 8, 2004 8:05:14 PM
JotSpot is way behind other open source 'wikis' like TWiki and ZWiki already well into this space.
Posted by: Sunir at Oct 14, 2004 12:42:30 AM
