Wetpaint Combines Discussion Forums With Wikis
Michael Arrington
21 comments »
Seattle-based Wetpaint, which launched in June 2006, is a hosted wiki site that focuses on great looking sites and making the user interface as easy as possible. A number of wikis have popped up around popular pop culture stuff, as well as more private sites.
Tonight they added new feature that should generate a lot of page views - they have fully integrated a forum/message board into every wiki.
This isn’t Tangler-level forums (which we consider to be the bleeding edge), but they’ve put a lot of thought into the feature set around these message boards. Posts can be tagged, the view expanded/contracted, there are email notifications of new messages, and the search feature works well. Any forum thread can also be turned into a wiki with a couple of clicks.
CEO Ben Elowitz says the two products go together well - wikis are great for evergreen content but don’t allow for good conversation. Forums allow great conversation but aren’t great for new readers. The hope is that by combining them they’ll allow for better content for all users. And in the process get a lot of page views.
Other startups innovating in the forum space (besides Tangler, mentioned above) are Meetro and Grouply.
The hosted wiki space is crowded, and Wetpaint competes with Wikia and PBWiki, among others. Comscore shows Wikia in the lead with over 3 million monthly uniques, followed by Wetpaint with 1.3 million and PBWiki with 770k (Wikipedia, of course, is the 800 pound gorilla, with 228 million unique monthly visitors):
I don’t see how you can considder Tangler ‘the bleeding edge of discussion forums). 3/4 of the features you mention are standard on all forum-software. Also, when opening a thread, you never know where you gonna end up (the last post or somewhere int the middle … what’s up with that?!).
Anyway, enough about Tangler … I’m gonna check wetpaint …
this news is more than 1 year ago was published in engadget, and i thought that it was a marketing viral ad.
We read you quite avidly. On your blog directly or thru techmeme.
This is offtopic but since you guys are so famous on techmeme we have to ask you this. Why is there no search on techmeme ? If not then why not create one?
We tried but its not working as desired. Can you help?
Tangler seems to be not so bleeding edge from the SEO perspective - the forum threads are shown in Flash so The Google isn’t going to find them. So you won’t be able to improve your SERP position by allowing your visitors to interact on your site and to add your-topic-relevant content to your site - if you use Tangler. PhpBB and similar engines are much better from this perspective.
you left out pibb, which i perfer to tangler
http://pibb.com
Wetpaint have been spamming me since a long time. I have unsubscribed numerous times but the mails dont stop. In fact I get their spam on my office email address which i use only for office puposes, for registration for conferences.
its a major turn off!
Aditya,
Please send an email to support@wetpaint.com and we’ll take care of that for you. I just checked in our database, and both of the email addresses we have for you are completely opted out.
Thanks,
Jason
QA Manager
Wetpaint
Aditya,
I’m a developer at Wetpaint who, like you, hates spam. I apologize for your bad experience. We make it a point to only send emails that contain useful information related to wikis you belong to, and we’ve tried to make it very easy to manage your email notifications and to cancel your membership in wikis you may no longer be interested in.
If anyone else shares Aditya’s feelings or has ideas about how we can improve the email experience, please let us know ( http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/page/Feedback ). We take our users’ ideas very seriously, and most of our best improvements started with users’ feedback.
Sincerely,
Ben F (not Ben E., our CEO)
Oh, I guess Jason and I were writing our posts at the same time. I should have known, I only sit ten feet from him. I told you we take user feedback seriously.
Have you actually used Tangler? Once you do you’ll never go back to old “reload the page” forums — it’s a generation ahead. I guess the others aren’t doing it yet cause it too hard (half joking). But really I think they are on to something cool, but it’ll take time to get it right. Good on them for innovating though.
And Tangler have already said they are working on the SEO fix.
Wet Paint is hosting a number of my copyrighted Flash games on their servers. When I called them to remove it, they just said it was a user who uploaded the games and they couldn’t do anything about it.
However I found out about the wiki from a wetpaint sales rep spamming me, so obviously it’s not just the user who creates the wiki.
+1 for jamie, thanks for mentioning Pibb
http://pibb.com/pibb
“Bob”,
We take copyright violations seriously. Please use the stated process in our Terms of Use (http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/terms) for reporting copyright violations so that we can legally track them appropriately.
Jason
QA Manager
Wetpaint
Hey guys, Mick from Tangler here.
Wetpaint looks great. They’ve done a really good job of the combination. Just having it on a single page changes the dynamic. And the nav is good too.
Pibb is cool too. Very light and fast, lots of cool features.
Tangler have solved the SEO issue and that’s coming out in our next release. It’s a key one that we wanted to do right, so I’m glad it’s finally in.
Key thing for us is that there is 100’s of ways to talk and there should be more. Wetpaint solves one of the key challenges, I think, of Wikis which is ‘what happens when your content doesn’t fit the ‘one perfect page’ philosophy? What if the content is the best we have now and but needs solid debate.
Again, job well done.
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It deserves mentioning that Central Desktop has had similar integrated discussion thread functionality for about a year I think…and they’re email driven…so no need to visit the wiki to post.
http://www.centraldesktop.com
I’ve stopped looking around since I began using Central Desktop about 2 years ago so thanks for keeping the world of wiki on the front burner.
wetpaint is in a class by itself in the wiki dept, but they still need a few key features - basically, they need a white-label solution - no ads, customization, etc. i’d like to use it for a knowledge base site instead of salesforce.com, but they don’t have the feature set, yet.