A couple weeks ago we released a new version of our Jotspot wiki. The team really knocked it out of the park with this release. I highly recommend you go check it out.

If you have tried to contact me in the last three months, I apologize for my lack of response. The release pulled me underwater and I haven’t read my personal email in quite some time. I’ll be doing my best over the next couple weeks to catch up.

I wanted to talk a bit about what I was trying to do with this release. I joined Jotspot a year ago to figure out targeted application should exist in the context of the wiki. I think there are hundreds, if not thousands, of simple applications that people need to collaborate online. These can be as simple as a calendar and as complex as a project management tool. If you are going to build a product that is useful for the world at large, it needs to be immediately recognizable. A user needs to be able to immediately understand how it would be useful for them.

A wiki by definition is simply a website with an edit button on every page. Once a you understand this, it isn’t immediately obvious how you would start using it. Use it for two months to collaborate with a group of people and I guarantee it will change your life, but users don’t have that kind of time to invest in yet another tool.

When I released our Family Site product, we noticed different use patterns than our standard wiki product. For example average page counts and invited users were significantly higher. Part of this is because a family is a natural collaboration group. But equally important it is immediately obvious how you would use the product, and there is instant gratification for time you spend with it.

Applications are the key bridge to that “ah-ha” moment when using the wiki. But to be successful they need to be properly integrated with the wiki. A wiki is a great workspace because you can organize your content organically in a way that suites you. So I wanted applications to fit into this framework. The first three steps towards this are the ease at which applications are accessed, the ease at which you integrate applications into your wiki hierarchy, and the ease at which you integrate application data into other pages. The first two made this release, and widgets will follow in later releases.

To raise the visibility of applications we used a redesigned application section in the sidebar (screenshot to the left). This button bar makes applications feel more like first class citizens and acts as default navigation when you install an application.

To help integrate applications in to the organic wiki hierarchy we introduced the concept of pages types. In a standard wiki (and earlier versions of Jotspot) when you create a page, you are always creating a web page. With this new release, you choose what kind of page you want to create. Examples included spreadsheets, calendars, file repositories, and photo pages with this release and many more will follow. Any application installed in a Jotspot wiki has the option slot into the page type framework by simply implementing an API.

To make it easier to integrate application data into other pages throughout the wiki we will introduce widgets you can embed in pages. So for example, imagine if you could drop a list of upcoming events pulled from a calendar page into another page. Hopefully we will be able to get to this in a later release.

We also took some time to beef up some of the core functions of the wiki. We added features like the ability to easily choose a color scheme, upload your own logo, an improved link picker for linked between pages, and much, much more.