Thursday, September 29, 2005
Jot Live
The JotSpot team has launched JotLive, which includes a free offer for a personal wiki. The catch is that you are limited to five pages per month. This would mean that only a paid version would do it for me, since I usually have periods where I create a lot of content (way more than five pages) and periods where I create less than five pages. It should be noted that the paid options are rather cheap (with 15 pages a month being at only $5).Let's look at the functionalities. The pages are protected by a login, which is obviously needed for a personal wiki. You can create pages...and that's all! WHAT?!? From the company who made "application wikis" thee in-word, here's their newest deal: a webpage that allows you to write text. It makes Backpack look like a 7th generation wiki. Please.
XWiki is still by far the best wiki offer out there, they only need to get their act together and create an interface that normal humans can use. As mentioned before, it's free to create a wiki on xwiki.com and you get all the functionalities! You will have to be somewhat good at css and html to customize the look and feel, but if you have those skills, you'll quickly see the power of XWiki.
Lastly it should be noted that I have lots of respect for the Backpack team. They're a small team and they create applications of high quality. My critique is merely based on the fact that power wiki users will be annoyed by what is obviously very simplified wiki functionalities. For people who don't know what a wiki is and who finds it difficult to even administrate their weblog, I would still recommend going with Backpack.
Update: I had apparently missed the fact that JotLive's main selling point is that multiple users can edit the same pages at the same time. This functionality however doe snot seem to be part of the free solution or at least there's no mentioning of it in the free version. I wonder if you can somehow try it out to see if it's worth paying for?
Tags: jotlive jotspot wiki wikis xwiki
07:48 | Permalink | Comments (4)
4 Comments:
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Posted by
, at 29/9/05 16:47 -
That's correct - the only difference between the free and paid accounts is the number of pages you can create - up to 5 per month in the case of the free account. The live editing is available on *all* accounts, and there is not limit to the number of people you can invite to participate with you in the free account.
Ken Norton
JotSpotPosted by
Ken Norton, at 29/9/05 20:07 -
Wow, thanks for the Kudos ! Actually we are working very hard to build up the team and offer even more value and a better experience to our users and customers. Expect to see changes starting yesterday, for instance Cody's tremendously well done documentation effort on the XWiki.org site. It is true that our offer currently significantly appeals to a savvy generation of early-adopters, but we are determined to climb that S curve as fast as the special partnership we have with our user and developer communities can get us there.
Jeremi showed took me through Jot Live too and frankly, it does look like an early stage product. But I have full confidence that Jot will do some cool stuff in that area. On our side, we will be integrating Jeremi's OXYD real-time editor, which already has a slick UI...
By the way, are you up on the XWiki User's Map ? Thank you for your continued support !Posted by
Luis Arias, at 30/9/05 08:40 -
Thanks for the extra information regarding the JotLive application. It would be great if you guys could make it clearer exactly how to set up the live collaboration feature. I personally haven't seen any mention of this functionality while signing up for the free JotLive application and looking at the created wiki I still have no idea how to set it up. Otherwise, it sounds like a great feature and I'm lookign forward to trying it!
Hey Luis,
No problem for the PR, if you talk to Ludo you'll see that I know a lot more about XWiki than you apparently know ;) I still recommend that you guys speed up the mise en place of the more user friendly xwiki.com and have it as a priority over the xwiki.org work. Trust me, it's the best prioritization you guys can make! You'll thank me later ;)
a+Posted by
Thomas, at 30/9/05 09:16
I've signed up for a free JotLive account, and as far as I can tell it is exactly the same as the paid account. At least the functionality seems to be the same as what is described on their site.
I'm not sure what it is you are "missing." This service allows multiple folks to work on the same page at the same time and see edits as they are being made. This differs from your typical wiki, because you don't have to "wait" for someone to make changes in order to go in and view them (and make additional changes). It is more like an IM/whiteboard environment than a plain wiki.
I think it's got a lot of potential and given JotSpot's trackrecord, I wouldn't be surprised if they begin to offer additional features. I, for one, would like to see a separate chat/IM interface in which folks could discuss the edits they were making.