I just wanted to offer my congratulations to the crew at JotSpot. They've worked hard, built a great product, and they deserve this success. It helps that they have every Jotspotter I have met or corresponded with has been universally friendly and gracious. Well done.
Having Google enter the wiki market directly is going to be interesting. It will certainly push the knowledge, acceptance and adoption of wikis further and faster. JotSpot as a free service is going to make life more difficult for the other hosted wikis. But on the other hand, Blogger is free and yet WordPress and TypePad are still thriving products. I feel there is still room for competition here, but if I were one of the other hosted wikis, I would definitely be concerned. Of course, Yahoo! is still out there, waiting to purchase someone.
The enterprise side of things is much more difficult to divine, especially since Google's enterprise strategy is so embryonic. But this post from Scott McMullan seems portentous:
From Gmail and Google Calendar to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google is pushing the envelope of web apps big time. Joining this product family brings new and exciting opportunities to put JotSpot to work both as a wiki and as a collaboration platform.
Those products (plus GTalk) well-integrated would be an impressive Office 2.0 offering. But integrating them well is going to be a real challenge. And we're still left with the question of how Google is going to monetize their enterprise strategy. The business model they choose, and what they ultimately decided about the installed vs. appliance vs. hosted debate, will obviously have a huge impact on how this plays out.
I think the Google/Writely acquisition is probably a good model to examine. They were acquired in March '06, The reopened user registrations in August '06. They started using Google Account Sign-in in September '06. Jotspot will likely be consumed with the technical transition for a similar amount of time. After that, past experience with Google leads me to believe that Google/JotSpot will be going to be focusing on the consumer/SOHO market for the immediate future. But who knows. The Jotspotters who posted about the deal all seem very excited about the big plans they can't tell us about. I wonder what they are….
More
Zoli has some useful insights on the deal.
So does David Berlind.
Brady Forrest's post on O'Reilley Radar is also worthwhile.
Wiki-blogger Stewart Mader has just published a brand new book called Wikis in Education. Stewart has been blogging on Wikis in Education at http://ikiw.org for quite a while, and this book is a collection of case studies that delve more deeply the topics of the blog. The book covers a lot of ground in many different educational contexts. Some case studies were done by Confluence users, and other not, but they're all interesting.
Stewart is publishing the book using Confluence (which is cool in itself). Two chapters and the introduction (which was contributed by Mike) are publicly available now. $19 gets you access to the full book, as well as PDF versions of each chapter. The book is excellent — we think it's valuable enough that Atlassian is planning to buy a copy for our academic customers. Academic or not, if you're interested in seeing how wikis are actually being used in the field this is a terrific collection of real use-cases.
Via Kottke, so you've probably all seen this already, but this time-lapse political map of the Middle East is incredibly cool. The informational resolution is a little low, but it gets the point across. Too bad we can't include this sort of thing in a textbook. But that day will come.
Now that I've had a week to reflect on the Office 2.0 Conference, I find that I can't really shake my initial reactions. Overall, the conference was worthwhile, and I had a great time in the halls and at the events, meeting customers and competitors face to face. The Enterprise Irregulars' dinner was a blast.
Ismael and Julia did a fantastic job putting the conference together. Everything ran beautifully. The location was superb. The wifi worked. The food was good. He collected a terrific roster of speakers. But as for the actual content of the conference sessions, I walked away largely dissatisfied.
The panels were too similar and the topics were too broad. The discussion inevitably devolved to a small set of the same general questions ('What is office 2.0?', 'Is IT the enemy?', 'What about offline?'). But few speakers offered any data, any real-world experiences, or any solutions. Far too much time was spent arguing about these fairly mundane questions, and far too little attention paid to the actual transformative potential of 'Office 2.0' software.
Here are a few, unordered thoughts that I had a various points in the panel discussions:
Wow. Details on the SlimDevices forums. Initial reactions seem highly skeptical, but willing to wait and see. Personally, I wonder how this is going to change how the company can interact with its community. I hope they are able to maintain a similar degree of transparency. (Also, I wonder how much they went for.)
I (and several other Atlassians) will be at the Office 2.0 Conference on Wednesday and Thursday this week. We'll have a demo booth and Mike is speaking on one of the panels: Managing Blogs & Wikis in the Enterprise. We're also sponsoring the bloggers' dinner on Wednesday night. If you'll be at the show, please stop by and say hi. Feel free to give me a ring if you want to meet up.
Last time Mike was in San Francisco, we drove down to the PodTech offices in San Mateo to do a short interview with Robert Scoble, formerly of Microsoft.
I've been reading Scoble's blog for quite a while, and have learned a lot from his advocacy of corporate transparency — through blogs or other means. It's one of the reasons that I am happy to be working at Atlassian, where we work to be as transparent as possible.
Scoble interviewed us for about 20 minutes about the wiki market, what it means to sell enterprise software, about doing a startup outside the US. We saved about 10 minutes for a demo (which has yet to be posted). Mike did most of the talking, but I show up a few times in the middle. And since this is my blog, you get a screenshot of me. Click on my smiling face to watch the whole thing.
Yahoo! Hack Day was so worth the trip. The weekend could not have gone any better. I still can't believe that the folks at Yahoo Developer Relations were able to pull this off. I honestly never expected the event to be this good, or this much fun.
Wifi
The first thing worthy of mention was the wifi; it was unbelievably good. Yahoo managed to provide access for three hundred of the most internet-addicted people on the planet without a hiccup. Everyone got an individualized password when they showed up. According to Jeremy Zawodny, the Yahoo IT staff took this event as a personal challenge. It seems that plenty of Yahoos had been at the Future of Web Apps two weeks prior, where miserable wifi access was the one universal complaint of an otherwise excellent show. Yahoo learned that lesson well. And their IT staff rose the the challenge (in a matter of hours, I heard). They managed to throw up an parallel network using forty of the portable wifi access points that Yahoo keeps on hand in case of a network outage. The wifi network was then linked to Yahoo's internet backbone over a gigabit connection. The whole weekend I had solid, fast net access everywhere I went.
Sessions
Once you've got the essentials (wifi) down, it's time to start thinking about the content of the event. The first day was taken up largely with talks, sessions and tutorials about various Yahoo technologies. I attended several, but I honestly didn't get a great deal out of them. I had already heard or read most of what I saw presented. And I really just wanted to start coding. But what it allowed me to do was put a face with the technologies I was interested in using. Which came in handy shortly and is what gave Hack Day its true value.
Because the sessions weren't really the remarkable thing about Hack Day; far from it. Instead, it was the access. The folk giving the lectures were generally the same people who wrote the code they were talking about. And unlike a standard tech conference, they didn't disappear after their talk. Instead, they all just hung around for the next twenty four hours, drinking beer and answering questions. There was a help desk, where you could walk up and say, "I have a question about the flickr API." And they would answer, "Well, Cal Henderson, the architect of Flickr is right over here. He can help you!." That was just amazing.
[Read about what I built after the jump.]
It turned out that Beck the surprise musical guest at Yahoo! Hack Day. He just finished his set, and it was fantastic! Highlights include a live puppet show, bear costumes and two songs performed entirely with silverware.
I have seen Beck once before, at the Santa Barbara Bowl in 2004, but this was far and away a better show. And not just because I was 20 feet away. The song selection was better, the energy was higher, and the video stuff was entertaining rather than distracting. Great performance. I can't believe there were people sitting inside coding while he played! I'm sure there will be good stuff up on Flickr soon.
If you are a long time reader of this blog (and I like to flatter myself that there are long time readers. Or readers, frankly.) then you might have noticed a certain pattern in my writing. In case you didn't, here is the pattern. In 2005, lots of posts. In 2006, fewer posts. (Pretty simple pattern, really. You might have picked up on that.) In fact, there were about 3-4 months there in the spring when I didn't post at all.
Now, you may have chalked this up to a generally falling off of my interest in the blog, as happens to even the best writers. Or you might have assumed that there wasn't as much happening the in the wiki world to justify my writing about it. Or you might have deduced that is far more wiki-focused blogging than when i first started writing in 2004. But, I assure you, none of those reasons happens to be the case.
In fact, my blogging output dropped so significantly because I was working on something. Something that has absolutely nothing to do with wikis (sorry). Something that I am genuinely thrilled to finally be ready to talk about.
I listen to a lot of music. It's fair to say that my CD collection is just shy of massive. Some might say pathologically large. (It definitely seems that way every time I have to move.) And I have a list of music that I want that's nearly as long. Likewise with movies and books. Keeping up with that list in my head was something of a hassle, but even more than that, there is no way that I want to pay full price for all the CDs, DVDs and books as I want to buy.
So that's why I built WishRadar. It lets you create, search and manage a huge wishlist using the Amazon database. And WishRadar watches those items constantly (both new and used) and notifies you as soon as they reach a price you set. This is key, because the instant someone posts a used CD at a good price, it tends to get nabbed quickly. Time is of the essence, and checking manually just wasn't cutting it.
WishRadar lets can track new items with a simple bookmarklet, just like del.icio.us. Or, even cooler, when you're out in the real world you can use your phone to check prices and add new items to your list.
I also wanted to make it easy to share a wishlist, so your list is browseable by default and you get a nice URL that you can send around to your friends (who really should be buying you presents more often). WishRadar also publishes an RSS feed of your list so your friends and fans can watch it, or you can re-publish in other contexts, like your blog.
To make it easy to get started, we made it easy to import your existing Amazon wishlist. So if you've already invested a lot of time in your Amazon list, don't worry; we'll find it.
My friends and I have been working on WishRadar in our free time for about the last sixth months. It's been a tremendously fun process: for one thing, I learned Rails to do it. And we received invaluable help from lots of people, to whom we owe sincere thanks. And I'll have much more to blog about that, and about the process of building a web app, later.
But for now, go check out WishRadar. Sign up. And tell us what you think. Oh, and you can subscribe to the WishRadar blog for news and updates. Stay tuned.
Jonathan Nolen 