Socialtext, a corporate wiki tool, released Socialtext Unplugged today at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. It is
an unplug icon that lets users work on their wiki even when they are not connected to the Internet.
While still online, users can click the blue Unplug icon, which will then download a selection of wiki pages so that those pages become available offline. Once a user comes back online, the changes will be automatically uploaded.
“The blue Unplugged icon is similar to an RSS icon, which signals to a user there is a different way to use the content outside the browser. In this case, to use the content offline,” wrote Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, in his blog.
Socialtext Unplugged is an application within a single HTML file. When the Unplug icon is activated, it downloads pages as a Zip file, although re-synching occurs through Socialtext’s Wiki Web Services.
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This is a good sign and should. I could see “work while offline”/”sync when online” will be a standard feature in most of the applications going forward.
I like their visual diagram (email overload vs social text) that got my attention. Has anybody here given them a try to see if it works well?
neat
Just wanted to make sure that Natali got the whole story up - I’m giving a huge Call out to TiddlyWiki for making this what it is. Jeremy you ROCK!!!!
Socialtext Unplugged, developed in conjunction with U.K. software developer Osmosoft Ltd., aims to serve the occasionally disconnected. “It breaks a lot of people’s assumptions about what a Web application can be,” says Jeremy Ruston, the creator of TiddlyWiki and founder of Osmosoft. “It’s a Web application that doesn’t use a service.”
Like the TiddlyWiki software on which it’s based, Socialtext Unplugged relies on JavaScript to make the Web pages into self-contained applications. “It merges the document paradigm with the Web paradigm of computing,” Ruston says.
Thus users can visit a Socialtext Unplugged page, edit it, and save it using only a Web browser. And upon re-establishing an Internet connection, changes can be synced to a server-based wiki.
Really neat, I love it.
http://www.ezecho.com
Denver Wang, I’m sure I’m not the only one who is tired of reading your useless comments that are nothing more than spam. You are simply trying to get readers to a blog that contains incomprehensible grammar. To quote your latest blog entry.
“When a kid writing on his own notebook, no one take the note book as media, Blogger writing on his blog, then, bloggers thought their blog is the media, and call it “Self Media”
We never consider the notebook of kid are media, because the readers only including kid’s parents, teachers and himself. As same as most of blogs with limited readers. The first step for building up the media, is to attract more than 10 thousand users.”
Michael, I’m not sure why you don’t delete his comments, but I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one to miss Mr. Wang’s 4 word insights.
This is not a business, it’s a feature.
In regards to creating offline access, it will be interesting to see how Flex 2 will change the landscape with Apollo — a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.
Love the SocialText solution. Using it at my “day job” with great success.
And then you can put it on a USB Flash drive and take with you between computers. It is a nifty evolutionary feature for wikis to further keep collective knowledge alive.
Sincerely,
Ben
Ben Watson, VP, Collaboration (live online learning)
Thomson NETg, http://www.netg.com
Gmail needs to be unpluggable!
Hmm, anyone knows how it resolves sync-conflicts? I wonder how many people are going to get pissed off, because they spent an hour editing a wiki offline just to realize that the online page was updated in the meanwhile…
I guess they’ll have some merge (or merge parts) feature…
It will be interesting to see if the unplugged icon becomes the ’standard’ for online/offline access. It seems to make sense and is easily recognisable. What do other online/offline apps use? Maybe they can have 2 icons. When you are online the plug is in the socket and when offline it is unplugged.
.. as everything converges to Subversion.
The terminology “unplugged” is terrible. It’s really “offline”. It’s a nice feature, but harldy new for webapps - Quickplace was doing it it 1999. But as soon as someone comes up with a new name and a cute icon it’s suddenly the coolest thing ever.
The coverage seems to be more about the icon than anything else, which is…kinda lame.
I dont get it. Are people really finding wikis and such useful. The concept is sound but the functionality and usability, imo, leaves much to be desired. There’s just so much noise one needs to filter in a collaborative wiki that it makes it mind-numbing just to figure out what needs to be done not to mention how to do. Now there is an ‘unplug icon’ users must click to save while working offline. Why can’t this just happen automatically with a ’save’ button then resync when the users online?
Another poster mentined Tiddlywiki. I’d like to know if people find this tool useful. I recently tried out GTD tiddlywiki, and although nifty, it took way too many clicks and strange navigation paths to get the simplest things done.
Anyway, i’d like to repeat the tire mantra, ‘…it doesnt matter how good the technology is if no one uses it’ Wiki, tddlywiki, rss et al all have a long way to go in terms of usability before theyre adopted on a mass scale.
This is a pretty cool idea, though what if someone else changes the wiki in the meantime? Or outdated content? Does a page get checked out like SourceSafe?