Wetpaint Launches: Wikis Evolve

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1. Simran
   

   June 19th, 2006 at 12:05 am

   I tried editing the TechCrunch wiki, but couldn’t. The site doesn’t support Apple’s Safari. Really sad, considering some really creative, yet not-so-tech-savvy people use Macs.

   I like the product though. It needs some polishing up, but it has potential for sure.

   I bookmarked this post on digg:

   http://digg.com/technology/Wet.....kis_Evolve

2. Anders Abrahamsson
   

   June 19th, 2006 at 12:15 am

   There is a draw-back with the pop-up WYSIWYG editing, I think. And to be fair to this market, Stikipad should be mentioned. It is an incredible easy-to-use wiki, where in fact our project team kinda rejected Jotspot not picking it up because it was not enough easy to use, and after groking systematically the whole scene of hosted wikis, I landed on Stikipad after sandboxing almost everyone.

   It is a brilliant and far-away extension of the Instiki Ruby on Rails open-source core, merely used the Instiki as a starting template and taking it far far away from there - made by a small team of two. And with an intense innovation/improve rate.

   You can set edit mode into either textile/markup or WYSIWYG/rich text, supports CamelCase, attachment/upload area of 30MB for free account, and of overall user experience certainly deserves the testimonial “the wiki for those who hate wikis”. My testimonial would be “if you love Basecamp and Backpack, you will love Stikipad as well”.

   All that is not well funded is not automatically bad, to reverse the end note here: If you have less money, you have to work very smart. Less is More, in a different twist, or?

   Link: http://www.stikipad.com

   Peace,
   Anders

   Sustainopreneurship* Facilitator
   http://www.andersabrahamsson.info

   *Sustainopreneurship = Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Sustainability

3. Sam Davyson
   

   June 19th, 2006 at 1:09 am

   No support for Opera? No thanks then.

4. RYK
   

   June 19th, 2006 at 1:27 am

   why do they need so much funding…the site appears to be simple piece of software and the hosting can’t possibly be too much. Is the rest for marketing?

5. Hope Leman
   

   June 19th, 2006 at 2:21 am

   Didn’t see any quick (or any?) way to set up RSS feeds of changes to the wikis. Gotta have RSS feeds of comments. It boggles the mind that so many people are creating interesting tools but not including RSS feeds to changes. Many of us try out many tools a day and we don’t have time to go back and check sites for changes. Let’s get on the RSS clue train, guys.

6. Craig McGinty
   

   June 19th, 2006 at 3:08 am

   Must agree with Hope, RSS has to be a feature otherwise I’ve not got the time to keep dropping in. The same could be said for much forum software as well.

7. Ruminator
   

   June 19th, 2006 at 3:28 am

   Actually, RSS feeds are on the Recently Updated Pages section and on the Recent Comments page.

   From my contact with them, they are working on Safari and Opera support (it works great with Firefox). They are also working on a WYSIWYG for tables as well (that’s one thing that my wiki contributors have been asking for).

8. cram
   

   June 19th, 2006 at 3:42 am

   Hi Mike

   Thumbs down for Wetpaint. I just created a wiki. My biggest complaint is that the pages are too cluttered. Creating pages is also not the easiest of tasks. I would rate Pbwiki.com much higher.

9. Drew Olanoff
   

   June 19th, 2006 at 5:37 am

   Doesn’t seem useful at all. The edit interface is slick, yes. But overall, it seems like a clone of things I’ve seen already.

10. Markus
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 6:13 am

    I was “lucky” enough to get an invite to be a beta tester for this service when the beta was privately launched. Didn’t bother then, won’t bother now. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this company brushed into the web2.0 bust bin when the dust settles. The interface is NOT easy to use - it’s actually quite cluttered and unintuitive. And the biggest downfall? What’s the motivation here? You will allow me to create a wiki so you can earn contextual ad revenue and I get a nice pat on the back? If I take the time to do it, I better see at least some sort of revenue share. My advice: go with mediawiki or pbwiki.

11. BlogReader
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 6:42 am

    Why no mention of Social Text? The CEO also a pretty good blog and really understands the space. Do the founders of WetPaint have such a thing? I would be interested in reading it.

12. Jason
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 6:48 am

    I just read your post about Wetpaint and you seem to be missing the point. You talk about Digg being good for saving time, Wetpaint’s thing is that its EASY. Its obvious their going after the mainstream - its hard to be easy and I think they’ve done a great job.

13. Christopher
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 7:27 am

    I set one up pretty quickly and thought the interface was pretty cool. For that ‘mass-edited’ crowd that wants a simple way to create a wiki - (i.e. Blogger.com or hosted Movable Type), it seems to hit the mark. I agree that they should try to hit Safari and Opera in the future, as that could turn off some niche Wikis, I think the average person creating a wiki would be pretty eager to roll with this.

14. Ayon J Rayman
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 7:44 am

    I tried it out this morning. Seems very nice. My biggest complaint is I couldn’t figure out a way to get any kind of RSS feed into the pages or get RSS feeds of the pages out to another site/reader. I wonder why they left it out.

15. Tamara
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    So, consider the audience here. Techcrunch attracts tons of…techies. Like me. But Wetpaint is doing something for the non-techies of the world. It’s pretty easy to be critical when we’ve all seen all the other web 2.0 widgets out there–but how many of them make it really easy for regular people to do things like create a entire collaborative site? Yes, the ui needs some cleaning, and RSS support and cross-browser support are, i’m assuming, on their way. But I think it’s way cool that regular people can create entire sites really fast with this thing. To me, the ease of use is the story here, and the fact that Wetpaint is built for ‘regular’ people — many, many of whom are still totally intimidated by stuff us techies don’t even bother to think about anymore.

16. mamamia
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 9:30 am

    biggest problem…how many freaking “i’m an expert” sites are there? i love the look and feel of this…and can see a buyout in the near future, but really…where are you going to go for “expert advice”?…wetpaint, squiddoo, wikipedia, etc.

    if google or apple buys this out, then this will explode. (ironic that it doesn’t support safari when it looks like an apple site).

17. DotsMedia
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 10:06 am

    Well this site is another cloned wikis like squidoo.com or oozm.com or other many wikis out there. I don’t see anything unique that makes it different.

18. pos
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 10:19 am

    A wiki my ass, what a peice of crap, wiki’s are open source collaborative efforts, not closed cms ad driven systems, a real pos.

19. Erik Kalviainen
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 10:22 am

    I have to agree with cram and Markus that pbwiki is perhaps a better product. At least, I don’t see many advantages that Wetpaint offers other than a WYSIWYG editor.

    I’ve looked at Wetpaint several times now (including the first time it was written about on TC), and each time I am disappointed by its failure to deliver the features and overall style that I would like to see in their product.

    Having said that, I find myself waiting and wondering when they’ll get it right.

20. Phil
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 11:49 am

    Are there any keyboard shortcuts for this Wiki interface? I don’t have three hands. For instance:

    * If I’ve finished typing a wiki edit and simply want to hit “Save”, can I do that without bothering with a mouse? I can’t tab out to a submit button like I can with most forms.
    * What if I want to ”’embolden text”’ and don’t want to move my hand over to a mouse or select text? - and if I can do that, can we have a potted description of the commonest-used formatting syntax?
    * If I’m absolutely forced to use the “EasyEdit toolbar” to do formatting, are there accesskeys (ALT+key combinations that are a piece of cake to code into links and buttons on any webpage) for it?

21. tkdan235
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 11:56 am

    pbwiki blows everyone away. Use this crap and then use pbwiki and you will see why.

22. Mike
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 12:12 pm

    Per Phil’s comments - there are shortcuts for the basics similar to MSFT word.

    Bold, italics, underline and save are the standard ctrl + keys all seem to work very well for me. Not sure about the others but I’d be they’ll be on the way soon if they’re that easy.

23. Ayon J Rayman
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 2:58 pm

    The interface isn’t very intuitive. Granted, some basic functions are easy, but I had a heard time trying to figure out how to apply/use a template.

24. Nathan Waters
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 4:15 pm

    Maybe it’s just me, but I still find the good old MediaWiki to be more professional than this.

    It seems like a MySpace equivalent for the wiki… i.e. big flashing ajax editting UI, lots of things happening on the same page etc.

25. EA
    

    June 19th, 2006 at 8:44 pm

    I have to agree with there being no ‘opera’ plugin making it sandpaperish, but hey, I have been waiting a long time for this, well somewhat, even though the GIMP ‘could’ make the whole conversation worthless, if, there was a drive with the open sourcers to really take Linux beyond the sky.

26. Anders Abrahamsson
    

    June 21st, 2006 at 4:28 am

    My summary to comments responding and linking back to my #2. here;

    1. Stikipad supports RSS feed for every update/page/recent activity flow, as I have concluded. Management-by-feeds is the thing that is going to take RSS to mainstream, to my conviction.
    2. Browser support: IE 6+, Safari, Firefox. Dunno if Opera is in the loop. Hope so (especially now when Opera 9 has bittorrent support - yes I live in PirateBay-land of Sweden)
    http://support.stikipad.com/kb/show/BrowserSupport
    3. Before Stikipad, PBwiki was my vote, but the either textile or WYSIWYG setup of choice in edit made it easy-to-get for the newbies. PeanutButter is now my #2 choice.
    4. No contextual ads to disturb your wiki experience with Stikipad.

    Wetpaint, I agree that they make the same flaw as Wikia, to make money without revenue share and piggybacking other people’s content provision and stickiness. And with a cluttered interface, agreed.

    And for socialtext, I think that it is really packaged in another costume to have the enterprise wiki to tap into with fat accounts and price markup. Every wiki can turn into a enterprise wiki, that is the beauty of the concept. I even use a wiki when you are two, to share co-editing texts, with the potential for thousands to “be on the same page”.

    Re: shoutout websites “me, me, me” vs social media applications “we, we, we”;

    Squidoo is not a wiki. It is not very social at all. Wikis rely on collaboration, and Squidoo is expert shoutout app, just with a little social adding the other week (with the ability of comments added).

    Note/disclaimer: I have no commercial affiliation with Stikipad, I am pure third party and enthusiastic user (and feeding their improvement dep’t with constructive complaints/suggestions…).

    I am also a long-term U2 fan since mid-eigthies, but that does not mean that I work for Virgin Records U2 account. The same goes with my relation with Stikipad :).

27. oneafrikan
    

    June 22nd, 2006 at 9:32 am

    Thanks for your thoughts Michael - certainly makes you think that Wiki’s have a larger role to play in the larger internet arena than they have until now (which is good - isn’t that what the internet is all about?) - I’m thinking that just one of the Wiki companies have to make it big enough in the vertical consumer spaces for Wiki’s to reach the tipping point and go mainstream…

    Anyways, some more thoughts here:
    http://www.e-consultancy.com/n.....ullet.html
    Wonder if anyone has any comments to make on the user generated content and silver bullet issue?

28. Search Engines WEB
    

    June 22nd, 2006 at 5:03 pm

    A truly Web 2.0 Service if there ever was one - created a Wiki in ONE Minute from Start to Finish

    Would like a little more customization or the templetes - or the ablitiy to completely design one’s own - and the ability to add trackers/stats

    http://searchengines.wetpaint.com/

29. Jackson
    

    August 18th, 2006 at 1:37 pm

    I found this one online. http://www.ziwiki.com. Looks pretty cool too. It has simliar idea with the wetpaint. It has better features than wetpaint in some areas.

30. Kevin
    

    September 25th, 2006 at 3:52 pm

    Mac-users rejoice - Wetpaint now has Safari support.