Seattle based wiki startup Wetpaint has always been ahead of the pack in terms of design and usability. Now, a couple of years after launch, they’re starting to see real usage traction as well.
The product isn’t just about wikis - they also have social features (profiles, friends, etc.), and added things like forums and, more recently, photo uploads, over time. In many ways they are more like Ning, which allows users to create social networks easily, than other pure wiki sites like Wikia.
The company has raised just $14.8 million in capital. Compare that to $104 million for Ning. But in terms of user adoption, the two are much more similar.
Comscore says Ning had 3.8 million monthly unique visitors in March, compared to 3 million for Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 900,000 wiki sites and are adding 2,000 more per day - Ning has just 263,000 social networks. Wetpaint says they also have 3 million pages of content.
Ning’s traffic as reported by Comscore is still way above Wetpaint’s - 90 million monthly page views v. 18 million. But Wetpaint also allows users to put wikis under their own domain names, for free (Ning also allows this but charges a monthly fee). Most of Wetpaint’s biggest sites are under custom domains, they say, so a lot of their traffic isn’t reported by Comscore. They are probably still a lot smaller than Ning in terms of page views, but they are growing rapidly nonetheless.
Wetpaint has 70 sponsored sites now - wikis created by or for partners to promote specific brands or events. One example: HP has a community wiki on Wetpaint. Another: Showtime hosts wikis for all of their shows, like this one for The Tudors.
Given Ning’s success in raising capital and growing the number of networks on their platform, it isn’t surprising to see Wetpaint position themselves against them. Part of what makes Wetpaint different from other social networking sites, says CEO Ben Elowitz, is that people gather there under niche communities and do more than just share photos or videos - they create content around the things they are passionate about.
Wetpaint is also working on some other projects - including an embeddable wiki product called Project Balco, which we wrote about earlier this year - but won’t disclose many details yet.
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I was going to try out Wetpaint as a user community platform for our products but haven’t gotten around to it yet. They’re technology looks impressive tough. Maybe next weekend…
Peter
do you follow me on http://twitter.com/peterurban
I have experienced Wetpaint earlier and it’s worth an exponential growth
I thought Wikia was a search company?
Very interesting…wetpaint seems to have a lot of mainstream wikis (per quantcast) in terms of what subdomains they have that are seeing traction.
Compare that with ning where you see a *lot* of usage around the adult subdomains on the site. I don’t know about you, but I’d value main stream content a lot higher than adult content.
Wetpaint has done a good job creating a platform for social wikis.
Ning has done a good job creating a platform for social networks.
CollectiveX (http://www.collectivex.com) has done a good job of creating a social network/collaboration platform for the creation of “collaboration communities” called Groupsites. More focused on professionally minded groups that aim to make things happen collectively.
The social platform space is huge… each of these companies has a bright future ahead of them. Social platforms are clearly the next wave.
The really great thing about Wetpaint is that education sites can have all the ads removed, which means I can give my students a really good collaboration platform for nothing. Last year we ran a mediawiki server, this year we’ll probably be running the whole assignment on Wetpaint.
Page loads are hanging on cdn.sphere…
I thought we have a new contender - Google Friend Connect!
Too bad they don’t have a good Right-To-Left language support
Congrats to Ben and the team at Wetpaint, as well as Tom and the investors over at Trinity who had the foresight to invest. It’s great to see how widely adopted the wiki paradigm has become. Wetpaint is truly becoming an excellent resource for public collaboration.
“Unique pages of content” is a useful statistic?
At first, Wetpaint is more like a competitor of Wikia, but as you browse and use the site deeper, it really is a competitor to Ning and less of Wikia.
Might migrate here from Ning. In a way, its better to have the best of both worlds Ning+Wikia = Wetpaint.
I just finished teaching a course about the use of internet in commuinication/collaboration at
http://infotechtools.ning.com free open registration
We compared Google docs writer, Zoho writer and Wetpaint wiki by writing a paper collaboratively. We used Google docs along with the text chat capability from Yugma to edit the document in real time with around 10 people working. The writing task was coordinated through the text based chat. This approach worked just fine. Even simple features like auto save in google doc become life saver when it comes to every body editing the document at the same time.
Student tried the same approach with wetpaint and it did not work as well as as it did with Google doc.
My conclusion is that Ning is doing a good job of creating a social space and google doc will become the program to do the collaborative writing because it allows 3 ways to share the document and one of the mode is live editing of the document by all the participants.
Wikis were nice when we had wordprocessor but with things like Google doc I am not sure. The other day I went on a well known wiki web site and typed one whole page then I had to go to some other web page to get some additional information. In the process I lost the wiki page and all the one page write up because I forgot to save. I do not have to worry about that when I use Google doc and it allowed us to do live editing.
We found wiki program to be slow. The changes have to be saved first. Student learned it the hard way by losing their work and then it takes a while before they show up within the document.
I know wiki are popular for collaborative writing but with Google doc and my own experience I am not so sure about wikis.
I’m using Wetpaint for educational wiki sites. The social features are balanced well with the powerful collaborative tools. The overall design is very appealing and slick. Extremely user friendly. Students can easily jump right in and start creating and contributing content. Love it!
Wetpaint is a very interesting product with a strong (and free and hosted) user experience. I just posted my latest review of the Wetpaint wiki as part of my ongoing series looking and comparing the top hosted wikis. Take a look and let me know what you think…
http://tpgblog.com/2008/05/19/.....ou-dip-in/
Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com
WTF with post #15 - isn’t TC policing user comments. Looks like Akismet missed the spam - but it’s obvious to all of us HUMANS that comment #15 is pure spam…and it’s been sitting there for 2 days!