Palo Alto based Wiki startup SocialText, founded way back in 2002, is announcing version 3.0 of its software this morning. The upgrades are designed to put a little “social” into the enterprise (and to sidestep, as much as possible, the recently relaunched Google Sites, a direct competitor).

SocialText sells Wikis to companies, for the most part, although they also offer an open source version of their product. They offer customers a choice between a SaaS version and a higher end appliance, although the only real difference is where the server sits (your location or theirs). Founder Ross Mayfield says that of their 4,000 customers, 80% use the SaaS product, but 80% of their revenue come from the appliance.

The new products, Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People, are being demo’d now and will become available to all customers within 60 days, Mayfield says. The products are effectively extensions of their normal Wiki product.

SocialText Dashboard, pictured above, is a Netvibes-like customizable home page. Users can add SocialText widgets that show information from the company’s wiki - total edits, a list of workspaces, change summaries, etc. Other widgets are for productivity, like a calendar, or just for fun, like a YouTube widget.

All Dashboard widgets are Google Widget compatible, which means that, subject to security settings, they can also be added to sites like iGoogle. But more importantly, all iGoogle widgets can also be added to the Dashboard page. So you can, for example, pull Gmail directly into your SocialText Dashboard.

Users also create profiles (see below) and add “friends” within the organization. You can monitor the activity stream of mutual friends as well, which includes outside services such as Twitter.

For a lot of enterprise employees, having a single dashboard with secure company information alongside fun or useful outside services on a single dashboard is exactly what they need. It also makes SocialText the center of a worker’s day, which means they far less likely to ever lose the customer.

It’s clear that SocialText is forging ahead and trying to find a path that doesn’t make them sell against Google Sites, at least yet. Hopefully by the time those enterprise customers start to think about integrating some or all of Google’s productivity suite, SocialText will already be a daily part of employees’ lives. Then they can keep charging those attractive user fees.

SocialText has raised just under $12 million over three rounds of financing. Last November, Mayfield moved into the Chairman/President role to make room for a new CEO, Eugene Lee. The company has 50 employees.

As Google gets into the wiki space with Google Sites (the relaunch of Jotspot), all the other little wiki startups out there will need to keep one step ahead. Those includes Wikia, Socialtext, Wetpaint, and PBWiki. As it approaches 500,000 wikis, PBWiki is now putting the 2.0 version of its site into beta. The latest version includes an updated UI, folders, enhanced access controls and an easy way to customize the look and feel of your wiki page (see the screenshot of a customized TechCrunch page below or this generic demo page). The 2 million people a month that the company says visit PBWiki should like that.

Personally, I find the UI to still be something that an engineer would love more than a graphic designer. But it is an improvement. Adding skins is a move in the right direction. What’s your favorite wiki?

We reported in July that Palo Alto-based wiki startup SocialText was looking for a new CEO to help speed growth.

Tonight they are announcing their new CEO - former Cisco and Adobe exec Eugene Lee. Founder and former CEO Ross Mayfield becomes Chairman and President of the company. The company is also announcing a $6.5 million second tranche of its Series C funding ($3 million was announced in May 2007). The company has now raised a total of $14.1 million.

SocialText, a wiki startup based in Palo Alto, is looking for a new CEO. Founder and current CEO Ross Mayfield wrote a post on his personal blog today, saying the company is looking for a new leader to “take it to the next level.”

I spoke to Ross for a few minutes this evening. He says he’s really good at the early stage and externally focused stuff - marketing, strategy, fundraising, etc. He’s looking for someone to complement those skills - a seasoned CEO who has experience growing a company through later stage hurdles and, particularly, to streamline operations. Ross will stay on as Chairman and president of SocialText.

Many companies go through this - the type of person who can make something out of absolutely nothing and get a startup off the ground often doesn’t have the skills or desire to manage the growth phase of a company. Ross also started SocialText in 2002 - and guided it through the very dark days of the downturn. I don’t blame him for looking for a partner to help him move the company forward. He’s been at this for five years and probably needs a break.

I also think SocialText is going about this the right way, with an up-front blog post saying exactly what they intend to do. Compare this to how Technorati handled their CEO search, which was done in secret and eventually leaked because the executive search firm tasked with finding the executive sent out the document to one too many bloggers. They weren’t able to control, or even contribute to, the messaging, and by the time CEO Dave Sifry confirmed the search a lot of damage had already been done to the company.

JotSpot, a competitor, was acquired by Google in late 2006.

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.

Like it or not, wikis are a dime a dozen these days. So when (and if) it comes time to choose one, WikiMatrix is a good place to start. It’s a site that allows you to compare any and all wikis on the market in a side-by-side grid.

WikiMatrix has over 100 wikis to compare. The wiki designers maintain the information on their listing because, as WikiMatrix founder Andreas Gohr puts it, “nobody knows a product better than its creator.”

WikiMatrix was launched about a year ago and Gohr says that it is popular enough within the wiki developer community that wiki owners are proactive about getting their sites listed. But he says that users’ knowledge of wikis usually doesn’t go much further than Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia was written to power an encyclopedia,” Gohr said via IM on Friday. “Not everyone needs an encyclopedia. Others might have the need to have the wiki integrated into enterprise structures. There are various different use cases for wikis and various different engines and each does things a little bit different. If you decide to replace the Intranet of a 5,000+ employee company with a wiki you may need to compare different choices. That’s what WikiMatrix is for.”

Users can also create their ideal wiki on the site and then see which wiki comes the closest to matching their needs. Gohr’s 10-person company also launched ForumMatrix.org last year as a spin-off, which is basically the same site but for forum software, although Gohr admits it isn’t as popular as WikiMatrix yet.

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.
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SocialText has announced an agreement with Dan Bricklin for the exclusive distribution rights to his wikiCalc spreadsheet software (Dan Bricklin is also the creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers).

Like Google’s new Spreadsheets application and other online spreadsheets, one of the goals of wikiCalc is to end the “email volleyball” issue (as SocialText CEO Ross Mayfield puts it) where spreadsheets are sent back and forth between users for editing. Most of the new online spreadsheets applications allow various levels of viewing and editing a single version of a spreadsheet, which is stored on a server instead of locally.

But wikiCalc is a much more significant, if less flashy, piece of software than Google Spreadsheets, particularly now that it is being paired with SocialText’s development and enterprise sales resources. It provides the first real non-Microsoft alternative for companies wanting to edit spreadsheets on the network but who are not willing to have third parties like Google storing their data. Upcoming versions of Office will have similar sharing functionality as wikiCalc, but at significantly higher price points. And wikiCalc, like all wikis, will have a true audit trail built in - every change to every cell is stored and can be rolled back. It’s like an infinite undo button.

Socialtext’s wikiCalc software will be released under an open source license for installation directly onto servers. Later, a hosted version will be available and SocialText will also distribute it to its enterprise customers via an appliance (like SocialText’s other products).

UPDATE: A screencast showing the product in action is linked from here.