A few months ago, Google launched Google Sites, a hosted wiki product built on JotSpot technology. But until this week, Google Sites was only available to Google Apps users, which basically meant you needed to have your own domain name to set up a wiki. Now Google is opening Google Sites up to everyone.
If you've been living in a cave for the past few years, a wiki is basically a page that's open to collaborative editing. While Google doesn't call its new product a wiki, the service lets you create and customize pages, and share access to those pages by inviting a group of people to view and edit the content. In this way, you can plan trips, meetings, or other activities.
You can sign up by logging into Google Sites using your Google ID, or by registering for a new free account. Your page will be created at sites.google.com/sitename. If you want a custom domain, you can still sign up for the service through Google Apps.
Nearly a year and a half after acquiring Jotspot, Google has finally opened the hosted-wiki service back up to the public. Now branded as Google Sites and packaged as part of Google Apps, the service aims to help users create group collaboration tools that can be easily edited and changed. From within Google Apps, administrators can control which users can access a specific site and what, if any editing levels they can have. Right now Google Sites has only a few default templates to choose from, but we expect those options to increase in the coming months.
The best part of Google Sites is its instant integration with the rest of Google Apps and services. YouTube, Picasa, Google Calendar and Google Docs can all be embedded into Google Sites templates, making sharing and collaborating information easier than ever.
At the time of this writing, we were unable to try Google Sites out for ourselves (it has not been activated on our Google Apps accounts, nor on a new Google Apps account we just created), but the examples shown on http://sites.google.com and in the video above look promising.
Like the rest of Google Apps, Google Sites is free and can be linked to a domain name. Premier service, which includes support and additional storage is available for $50 a year per user.
It's been about a year since Google acquired Wiki/page creation/collaboration/calendar/etc site JotSpot. And for most of that year, there's been a message at JotSpot.com saying that you can't sign up for a new account because Google is still integrating the service.
Blogger Andrew Miller reports that Google may be preparing to launch some new JotSpot-based services starting next year. Miller attended a presentation with Google's Scott Johnston, where Johnston outlined a bit of Google's strategy for integrating JotSpot tools with Google Apps.
First up, Google will launch Google Sites, an expanded version of Google Page Creator. The service will let businesses set up intranets, manage packages, and build custom sites.
Google is also beefing up its online office suite and has plans to let users edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations while offline using Google Gears. There will also be offline support for Google Calendar and Gmail. Google also plans to integrate GrandCentral, another recent purchase, with Google Apps.
The word on the web is that Google could be transforming JotSpot into a Google Wiki.
Google acquired the WYSIWYG wiki website creator last October, and there have been numerous discussions about what they could be doing with it. From making it into the GDrive storage location for storing and sharing spreadsheets, calendars, files and photos, to integrating it into Google Apps as a business wiki. With the moving of the JotSpot help and support pages being transferred under the Google name this April, there is now a Google Apps service code name for 'jotspot'. This all means that Google is most likely building JotSpot into Google Apps accounts, and could be in the final testing phases before its release.
Stay tuned for news from the Office 2.0 Conference being held in San Francisco next week, Google could be dropping some news on this as well as the launch of Google Presentations.
Google acquired JotSpot, the hosted wiki development company, last October, and integration has been a slow process. It initially took a few months to get JotSpot Version 2.9 up and running and integrated with Google systems and released back to those that already had an account, but there has been no news on when it will be publicly available. The last Jot blog entry went over a few changes that they had made up until January 12th of 2007, and said that Version 2.9 was the last JotSpot version produced before migrating.
However, there has recently been news leaked about some new JotSpot help files hosted on Google.com, as well as a new JotSpot group in Google Groups. Could these only be for old Jot users? They don't appear to be linked from anywhere in the current JotSpot version, so they could hold some hope for a new release soon.
What will the new version of JotSpot contain? It could be the perfect location for the rumored GDrive where all of Google's applications, and user's documents could be centrally stored and archived. Only time will tell. But what we do know is that whatever JotSpot is released as, it is expected to be a free service with for-pay upgrades and add-ons.
It would be great if Google had one single location where every service they are offered was centralized, and it appears they're working on one.
After wondering why Google had purchased Jotspot some time ago, GuillaumeB and Google Operating system among others have come to the conclusion that JotSpot could be the start of a home for all of Google's applications and our documents; "The GDrive".
Currently with Jotspot, users can store, share and edit spreadsheets, calendars, files and photos, to-do lists, email lists, and track projects with a project manager. So, in reality it's not that far off from a possible centralized Google GDrive storage area where users could store all of their Google specific spreadsheets, documents, forums, blogs, mail, calendar, and photo galleries in a wiki type format. Could we finally see the GDrive released this year?
Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch caught what could be evidence that Microsoft is prepping some sort of online spreadsheet program, which would probably be a stripped down version of Excel.
Microsoft Developer Tod Hilton posted on his personal blog that he's moving from Microsoft's Global Foundation Services to the company's Excel Services team. And yesterday, he wrote that the product "has tons of potential and will probably be competing with the likes of Google Spreadsheets, DabbleDB, Zoho, and JotSpot Tracker."
A short while later, Hilton removed that text and updates his post to say that he was removing his "personal opinions." The implication is that we shouldn't read too much into what he wrote on the post, it may have just been excitement about moving to a new team. Either Microsoft is planning on developing an online spreadsheet application, or Hilton really thinks they should and wrote his post in a moment of blind enthusiasm.
Obviously there's not enough information here to determine whether Microsoft is developing online versions of other Office programs such as Word or PowerPoint. But one can dream. While we're dreaming, let's imagine that these applications would all be free.
Joe Kraus of Jotspot, has announced today that they have been acquired by Google. Jotspot is a leader in hosted wiki application development. Jotspot was founded in 2004 as the first company to offer this type of hosted wiki solution. Jotspot's goal was to make wiki websites that anyone could update and add to, without knowing coding. Jotspot had a simple WYSIWYG editor, with advanced search and email integration components. Jotspot was not only aimed at smaller personal projects, it was also aimed at corporate intranets, project management, and help desks.
Jotspots hosted plans once sat from a $199 month for 5000 hosted wiki pages with unlimited users. To a simple Personal account with 5 users, 10 pages, for free. Could we possibly see the integration of one giant free plan from Google?
Currently, Jotspot is offline to users. The Palo Alto based company says to stay tuned to regain access to the system. Google is most likely merging all data and transferring the Jot system over to Google's servers. This is an exciting move by Google, again, in the online application environment, adding to their online suite of applications with the likes of Documents, Calendar, Gmail, Spreadsheets, and Apps for your Domain.
After a long private beta period, hosted wiki service Wetpaint publicly launched this weekend. If you're familiar with JotSpot, there's not much to tell about Wetpaint: it's a service that lets anyone show up, create a wiki, and edit it via a WYSIWYG interface. It has all of the Web 2.0 trappings, including RSS feeds, tagging, and some nice Ajaxy touches. Pages have a prominent "EasyEdit" button that lets you edit content pretty much instantly without loading a new page. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch found the service a little more newbie-friendly than JotSpot and the many available templates attractive. Wetpaint wikis are free to create and edit, but the service is supported by contextual advertising. If you want to get an idea of what you can do with Wetpaint, a number of active wikis are linked to from the Wetpaint front page, and there's also a sandbox site you can play with to get used to formatting, tagging, and so on.
JotSpot has
introduced a new twist to the hosted wiki market with JotSpot Family Site, a
private wiki service geared specifically toward extended families. JotSpot Family Site provides birthday and event
calendars, Google-powered maps, family trees, polls, and a family blog. As someone who has a large extended family, it
sounds like a great idea if they can make it easy enough for anyone to use. JotSpot Family Site is in beta and most
appealing of all, free.
