December 2, 2007

Jotspot To Power the New ‘Google Sites’ App, What About Google Wiki?

A few months ago a member of the Google Blogoscoped forum noticed that appending ‘?service=jotspot’ onto your Google Applications login took you to a page that stated the service was not yet available – pretty standard right? Except that the page also featured a logo for something called ‘Google Wiki’ in the upper left part of the screen. Obviously it seemed as if Google was gearing up to launch it’s own Wiki builder based off of Jotspot (a company they previously purchased).

On Friday however, Google gave a presentation in Ann Arbor, Michigan (great town, I went to college there) laying out the future of Google Apps for 2008 and highlighting one area in particular: Google Sites – the application that will be replacing the current ‘Google Page Creator’. As noted by Google, ‘Google Sites’ will be powered by Jotspot and will be much more powerful and comprehensive than the mediocre Google Page Creator was.

With Google plans for Jotspot now publicly revealed, does this mean the Google Wiki project is dead? Perhaps – appending the same line onto your Google Apps login still takes you to the error page, but the Google Wiki logo no longer appears – or maybe it just means that Google Wiki will be a smaller part of this larger ‘Google Sites’ application

 Posted at 12:37 am by MG Siegler
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  • Ben Greenberg
    Aren't we talking about a wiki-based site building tool? You could use it as a traditional collaborative wiki space or to build out a site with pages only editable by one person. Arguably Google Docs and Page Creator are specialized wiki apps, with versioning and collaboration features. And folks have been building public sites with Twiki and other full blown wiki apps (even tiddlywiki) for some time now. I don't totally get the distinctions you are drawing, but I wasn't following Google's earlier talk about a wiki project.
  • MG Siegler
    @ben - while it wasn't clear exactly what Google Wiki was going to be - my guess would have been more along the lines of Wikia, some kind of app that lets you build more traditional wikis rather then websites from wikis (which I know you can do with wikia as well).


    It looks like what you're saying though is the approach Google is going to go with - utilizing Jotspot as a wiki-based full-on site builder.
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