SocialText aims for wiki 2.0
Blake Robinson
25 comments »
Enterprise wiki vendor SocialText rolled out version 2.0 of its software this morning and made a couple of changes that are important for people beyond its existing customer base. The changes include a drastic overhaul to the standard wiki interface and the release of a REST API to enable mashups with the company’s wikis.
SocialText has been in the market for four years. The 30 employee company has more than 2,000 customers and received funding from an all-star cast including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SAP Ventures, the Omidyar Foundation, Joi Ito and Reid Hoffman. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Whales, Tim Draper, Joi Ito and SocialText’s Ross Mayfield make up the company’s board of directors.
The new version of the software engages head on with what has been the biggest problem for SocialText and wikis in general; user interfaces have been awful. Today SocialText has added a number of features intended to make adoption by nontechnical users particularly easy.
Users will see a new dashboard immediately upon login that displays recent changes, their watchlist, information from across all work groups that user is participating in and a whiteboard shared with co-workers.
There’s been all kinds of navigation and sorting capabilities added throughout the site; including autosuggest for tagging and inbound links highlighted. Full screen page editing is the last thing that’s been added to the UI that’s important. While a WYSIWYG GUI helps many new users feel more comfortable with wikis than they would otherwise, the need to edit inside the shrunken text box that many web2.0 tools demand can mitigate the impact of the GUI. Give people a full page to write on and they feel like they’re in Word.
All of these UI changes could be summarized by saying that SocialText users no longer have to feel stuck in wikispace - there are now familiar and high-level perspectives available from which to interact with the wiki functionality. The company has made a good screencast demonstrating much of these changes.
APIs
The other big news about the new SocialText is the release of a REST API for developers interested in mashing up SocialText wikis with other data and services. The API has already been used to create an off-line SocialText client and at least one Google Maps mashup. A SOAP API has been available from SocialText for some time.
While APIs are not uncommon in the consumer wiki space (see the excellent PBWiki, for example, who just released an API this week) SocialText’s open source enterprise APIs are just the most recent of a long list of valuable contributions they’ve made to the online community. From donating their open source WYSIWYG toolbar to the world (a resource intensive thing to build from scratch) to offering free hosted wikis to important projects like Mary Hodder’s Speakers Wiki (a list of tech speakers, many women, for conference organizers to refer to) SocialText has a history of authentic actions exemplifying the “give more/get more” ethic.
While there are any number enterprise wikis available, Mayfield told me that he expects demand for wikis to explode in the next year as Microsoft and IBM enter the market in force. Once wiki style online collaboration becomes an all the more common practice, Mayfield believes that SocialText’s exclusive focus on wikis, four years of experience in the sector, open source technology and straight forward pricing structure will continue to set them apart from the competition. To that list the company can now add improved ease of use and hopefully a diverse ecosystem of outside mashups via the REST API.
Other companies won’t stand still and the current state of ghastly wiki UIs can’t possibly last, but SocialText has been laying down open source roots for four years that will be hard for competitors to unearth.
Its a very good tool. it should fair well in the weeks coming ahead
SocialText’s open source distribution requires owning the entire Apache instance. That puts the kibosh any level of traction with shared hosting providers. That’s one of the things that made Wordpress so popular — it was easy to install and PHP was so readily available.
Definitely a growing market if were to go by John Gotts $3million purchase of the domain name wiki.com.
In Web 2.0, collective intelligence will prosper. I use Wikipedia often;if Socialtext is similar to Wikipedia then it will be a success.
Web 2.0 belongs to you !
What will you invent in Web 2.0 ?
Yes,YOU and me!
Marshall, do you have a link to the offline client you’ve just mentioned?
Thx.
Can somebody please ban NeoTechie? This constant drivel about “Web 2.0 belongs to you!” is getting old.
Zoli, the company will provide that link when the API is out of beta, I’m told.
NeoDunce, I do agree that NeoTechie is regularly pretty over the top, but sometimes offers more than the above. Forward looking technologies are appealing to folks who have their heads in the clouds, just skip those comments if you like.
APIs for accessing the content of the Wiki is definitely a useful feature. Those that fear getting locked into the product have an option to take their content to another wiki implementation or CMS. In this regard it would be nice to have a non-proprietary standard format for wiki content. ODF would be my preference for such a wiki document interchange format.
In addition to providing developers a mechanism to extend their applications to include SocialText content in them, it would be nice to have an API for embedding third party widgets into SocialText’s wiki along with a user interface that makes this operation easy for novice users. I’m thinking of something like a widget palette that worked with their WYSIWYG editor.
Congrats to Ross and the gang at Social Text. I think this is the step in the right direction. For those who question NeoTechies’ assertions should look past his hyperbole and check out this essay for a more reasoned approach.
The future of this is “collaborative reading”.
I’m a huge fan of wiki (use PBWiki as my portable notebook), but have found a lot of resistance to it in the non-technical world. It seems that people really don’t grasp the whole idea of a community-organized web space…never mind the UI challenges. Hopefully as companies like SocialText will help with adoption. Does anyone have thoughts on how wiki compares to something like MS SharePoint?
Cabop. I think that’s a misconception. If you look at the statistics of largest Mediawiki wikis (found here. There have been over 188,000,000 edits on over 20,500,000 articles.
I think it would be hard for you to argue that people don’t really grasp the whole community-organized web-space. Even assuming that every one of the 4,000,000 or so registered users are hardcore users, it would mean a lot of people are casually editing wikis.
Its great that UI are getting simpler, because it lowers the bar for more people to jump on board. I just think that was a slight overstatement.
Marshall, I bow to Ross ability to finally pull this off, but I think your very formal and Socialtext-driven review fails to note how long it took Socialtext to enable changes it should have adopted morew than a year ago, and how other much less famous but faster and probably more agile companies have beaten Socialtext to this without the four experience.
Being Techcrunch an acute observer of which companies and ideas may be best opportunity for good investment it strikes me as unusual that you guys didn’t even notice (in this article) the competition and new ideas Socialtext will have to confront itself with, while closing the article with a very lame:
“Other companies won’t stand still and the current state of ghastly wiki UIs can’t possibly last, but SocialText has been laying down open source roots for four years that will be hard for competitors to unearth.”.
Look around yourself Techcrunch, Socialtext is not the only game in town and this review smells too as a kind present to Ross, but not at all as a well informed piece about where Socialtext really stands in terms of being able to listen and react to users needs in a fast and effective way.
Dashboard, tagging, and UI that gives users a comfortable place to work inside a wiki are not Socialtext firsts. That should have been noted as otherwise investors and users would be tricked into thinking that here is where the best wiki-related innovation is taking place.
But I really don’t think this is the case and I gently invite you to look beyond the informative PR communications from Socialtext.
Morale.: bravo to Socialtext, but Techcrunch must maintain its ability to see beyond PR and marketing hype and have a vision that is greater and deeper
than any of its individually reviewed companies.
That’s at least what I used to value you for.
Keep up the good work.
Robin,
I completely agree. I work for one of these smaller companies (I won’t say who because I hate shameless plugs.) We have submitted to Techcrunch for reviews several times (even before it became cool.) Denied every time. Why? Because we don’t help boost Techcrunch’s revenue and social circle. Techcrunch has a very narrow view of the world of web2.0.
Corporate America sinks another ship.
I am fascinated by the implications and applications of wikis. SocialText should be applauded for the recent announcements. Regarding whether these were true firsts across the board is arguable, but not as nearly as the combined package. Appealing GUI, ease-of-use for non-techies, robust functionality under the hood, adherence to open standards whenever possible, and raising awareness to speed the wiki adoption rate among the general populace is good for all of us fans of wikis.
Socialtext is clearly the best solution for enterprise wikis hands-down.
I’m confused. Is there some reason nobody has mentioned Confluence, which Socialtext is apparently just catching up to?
Catching up in non-busted UI, resizable WYSIWYG editor, etc., anyway — Confluence still has some advantages, such as the fact that I was able to dl and fire up an evaluation copy in less than 10 min.
No, I don’t work for Confluence.