Lee LeFever at CommonCraft posts some provocative thoughts on how best to integrate a wiki as one of several avenues of communication that a software company can use to communicate with its users. He makes some excellent proposals about how to get the most out of your communication investments — the maximum useful information with the least duplication of effort.
He makes the reasonable argument that different media are suited for different types of communication. Blogs and message boards are best at handling rapidly flowing information. Wikis are better as a reference. So you should set up processes that enable those specific uses but encourage them to cross-pollinate.
He also makes the often-forgotten point that wikis work best when they have someone to manage them. The gardening metaphor works best: a wiki can grow without supervision but it needs constant pruning to be most useful.
Well worth a read.
Jot, taking a cue from Atlassian's recent experiment, reports today on their 20% day. They built some pretty interesting stuff, some of which we'll hopefully see soon.
As Mike points out in comments, Abe Fettig's collaborative editing is just brilliant. Here's the demo. Looks like it uses some Ajax magic, including something similar to 37Signal's Yellow Fade Technique. Very slick. Having used SubEthaEdit a few times, I know how useful this really is, in the right circumstance. It takes the wiki a whole step further towards true collaboration.
Ken Norton, who recently left Yahoo! for JotSpot, has a post about the hackathon.
Also, see a few more hackathon photos.
Paul Boutin has a brilliantly written article on Wikipedia at Slate today. Paul sets up his article with a fortunitously timed and incredibly accurate comparison between Wikipedia and the H2G2. I have just re-read all of the Hitchhiker books in preparation for the movie, and I'm crushed that it never occurred to me do an article on the uncanny similarities between the two works.
Unfortunately, despite how much I admire his writing and his brilliant premise, I firmly disagree with his thesis.
As previously threatened, 37Signals has launched their newest product: Backpack. If you read my earlier post (while selectively ignoring the parts where I hedged or was flat-out wrong) I so guessed it! Backpack is a wiki! Sort of. Except where it's not. Well, here's the bit that I guessed right.
Unless it were a purely personal wiki. Hmm. That's also the kind of thing that would appeal to 37Signals: Ignore huge sections of a market and focus in on one very narrow use case — but totally nail it.
Of course, 37Signals is really smart about user-centered design, and so they never actually use the word "wiki." The word wiki is still just jargon at this point and they're shooting for a much less technical audience.
They're positioning it as a personal organizer, but watch the introduction movie and tell me that this isn't a wiki underneath. (That movie, by the way, is a excellent introduction to the whole wiki concept. I may use it next time I need to explain it to someone.) And the product is pretty slick.
The party this weekend went really well. Thanks to a lot of help from my friends, everything came off swimmingly.
If you're interested, take a look at the photos on flickr. If you have any more photos to share, send 'em over and I'll add them to the set.
Thanks to everyone who came. I had a blast. Hope you did, too.
After a fairly news-free period in the world of wikis, there is something potentially big: SocialText raised their second round of funding. See Ross' tease here. Congratulations to the SocialText guys — that's very good news, and a further validation of the whole wiki market. I still think it's going to be huge.
Ross won't reveal any of the key details until the end of May, but he's turned it into a kind of game. The first person to guess (and blog) the actual details of the round prior to the official announcement wins five licenses of SocialText.net for a year. I've no time to research this now, but I'll see what I can come up after the big party this weekend.
I do have a few initial impressions, though. Of course, the first question on everyone's mind is, "how much?" (The who could be equally important, but face it — everyone starts with the amount.) Relevant history: SocialText closed an Angel round ($300k) in June of 2003 and it's A round ($500k) in August 2004. JotSpot raised $5.2mm in October 2004. None of the other wiki makers are venture-funded, as far as I know.
The JotSpot round is an interesting comparison, but I'm leery of using it as benchmark for SocialText's valuation. A couple things could have inflated the JotSpot number: first, the reputation of Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer as the founders of Excite undoubtedly pushed their valuation up. And secondly, Kraus and Spencer were themselves investors in the round and (as far as I can tell from the press release) their investment is included in that $5.2mm. So it's not exactly a level playing field on which to compare.
Anyway, I'm not prepared to hazard a firm guess yet. I don't think it's going to be game-changing. But hopefully it'll give SocialText more breathing room than their last round did. I'll give it some more thought and research over the weekend.
Oh, yeah. I'm having a party this Saturday — if you're in the neighborhood and want to come, drop me a line.
Just wanted to point you to the just-released trailer for Serenity — Joss Whedon's Firefly movie. Firefly was, for a brief shining moment, was the most brilliant, best written, most affecting, best acted, most creative show on television. I was fairly well crushed when Fox canceled it. So I've held on to pretty high hopes for the movie. But what I saw in the trailer was more than I ever imagined. It looks huge. And there are so many great snatches of dialog. Oh, I hope the movie delivers.
If you never got to see Firefly when it was on TV, you should go pick up the DVD and give it a try. You won't be sorry.
After writing about Google's 20% time commitment to personal projects, I wanted to be sure to point this out. Mike from Atlassian reports on what happened when he gave the same idea a try at his company. (I suppose instituting radical new policies is easier when you're the founder.)
They called it FedEx day (motto for the day: "We Deliver"), and out of it came some really kick-ass feature additions for Atlassian's products, several of which will ship in the very next versions. [Which must be getting close by now…. right, mate?]
Since Mike gave his developers free reign, they added more than just features. There were also improvements made in tech support automation, in infrastructural code (like exception handling), in distribution methods, and in diagnostics. Several of the developers developers took the opportunity to make their jobs easier.
You might argue that they should have focused their efforts on providing immediate user-value. But think about how these investments will pay off in the long run: every minute a developer is able to shave off dealing with tech support is another minute spent coding. And those saved minutes, over a year, will add up to far more features than anyone could have added in a single day.
It those kinds of investments that are not immediately noticeable on the bottom line, but are perfectly suited to programmers' discretionary time. Too often, developers are too busy just trying to stay ahead of customer demands to spend time on making themselves more productive. We have a developer on our team who spends a great deal of his time on non-feature related code, and our whole team has seen enormous productivity boost because of his improvements.
I had another great experience with an Open Company this weekend. I now have another example to add to my lists of companies who truly get it.
I've been a more-or-less happy owner of two SlimDevices' Squeezeboxes for a couple of years. The Squeezebox is a small audio component that can wirelessly access a music library stored on your computer. I use them to stream MP3s to different rooms in my apartment. I chose the Squeezebox because, at the time, it was the only product on the market that was able to stream the same music synchronized to multiple rooms. It's a great solution for whole-house audio, and much easier and cheaper than trying to run wires through the walls.
There are other products on the market now which offer synchronized streaming (in particular, local Santa Barbara company Sonos), but I still think Squeezebox is the right choice. I may go into greater detail about that in a later post. But for now, let me say that I think the Sonos player is brilliantly engineered product with a phenomenal interface. But the price difference is significant. And the Squeezebox has the advantages of openness, as you'll see below.
Jonathan Nolen 