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JotSpot Born Again as Google Sites, the Wiki-less Wiki.

Three weeks ago I speculated that JotSpot, the user-friendly wiki swallowed by Google a year and a half ago would soon come out of hibernation, and Voila! here it is, rebranded as Google Sites. It is the first service only available as part of Google Apps (including the free version), although I had some difficulty accessing it. Under “Manage this Domain” I could add “Sites” as a new service, but it did not show up on my account as an accessible application. When I typed sites.google.com it wanted me to sign up for Google Apps even though I was already logged in to my account. Of course trying to do so resulted in the error message:

Google Apps for zoliblog.com has already been registered by your domain administrator. Please contact your admin directly to get access to Google Apps services.

Catch 22. But there’s a solution: just type the direct URL (sites.google.com/a/yourdomain.com as default, or customize it to your liking) and you can get into Sites. I’m sure Google will soon add it to the Apps menu. (Sidenote: my old JotSpot account is still alive at name.jot.com).

Google no longer calls this a wiki, which I think is a good move. I previously wrote:

Wikis have arrived when …you don’t even have to know what they are to use one. You don’t have to know you’re using a wiki, just happily type away, creating shareable content on the Web.

I was discussing Wetpaint, the user friendly, wiki-less wiki there, and I think it’s smart of Google to follow that pattern… more later, but first, under the hood it is still a wiki, so let’s examine some of the wiki basics.

The interface is familiar from good old JotSpot (as a sidenote, the old JotSpot accounts are still alive at name.jot.com). There’s a basic wysiwyg editor, the Edit button is large and visible, and so is the New Page button. Good old JotSpot had several more ways of creating new pages, which are gone – perhaps for the best:

  • WikiWords or CamelCase: in old JotSpot anything you typed with embedded capitalization became a link to a page. As a relatively early wiki-user I liked it, as the easiest way to LinkAsYouThink. But in the Web 2.0 age we keep on bastardizing grammar writing EveryThingLikeThis, so more and more WikiWords had to be “unlinked”… too much confusion, especially for the new generation of mainstream users.
  • Linking to a shell-page before it’s created. This was a useful feature, even if we eliminate camelcase, I could use the “Link” icon, and mark up text as a link to a new sub-page, to be filled with content later. Again, this supports flow-thinking, or LinkAsYouThink, which I regret is gone.
  • The “New Page” button. This is the only remaining option in Google Sites, and I think the fact that it offers to pick a parent page (enforced hierarchy) is an improvement. No more orphan pages, yet relatively flexible hierarchy.

For those not too familiar with wiki terms, I discuss some of these concepts in more detail here: technically an article on SocialText 2.0, but I often make comparisons to JotSpot and Atlassian’s Confluence.

I’m glad to see Sites retained breadcrumbs for easier navigation, and they added sitemaps, a tree-style view of all your pages. This could be improved to allow for drag-and-drop style moving of the pages (changing the hierarchy), like Zoho Wiki does.

I’m surprised Sites still does not have inbound links: this is a critical feature for all wikis, whatever we call them. A wiki is all about associating pieces of information with each other, and the inbound link, also referred to as backlink shows you where the information on the current page is used elsewhere. The JotSpot tea half-recognized the importance of backlinks, as they were available as as a downloadable plugin on the Jot Development wiki, but never made it to the standard feature-set, and are apparently lost in the Google reincarnation, at least for now.

Attachment handling is as good as it was in the original JotSpot: it maintains previous versions, allows users to revert to earlier ones…etc. However, Google missed a huge chance here to by not offering to convert the attached documents to its own Google Docs style. This point takes us to the next level: stepping outside the boundaries of a standalone wiki and using it as a facility to pull together data created by other applications.

Last year I said after burying JotSpot for a year, Google can’t just release it as a wiki, instead:

…I hope that means they rethought everything and integrated JotSpot well into a number of offerings.

  • It could provide for much better document management than the current Docs &­ Spreadsheets UI.
  • It overlaps with Page Creator, also with the simplified version found in Google Groups – in fact Groups which is no longer just email lists but a rudimentary collaboration platform and JotSpot could very well be merged / integrated.
  • Finally JotSpot tried to provide primitive applications (spreadsheet, calendar..etc) all of which have a better Google counterpart, so one would hope they will be replaced, too.

Well, what’s the score on that prediction? Google Sites is a better replacement for Page Creator, Google ditched the JotSpot “apps”, replacing them with their own ones – so far 2 scores out of 3. As for document management.. well, I’d say half a score, or less. (Hey, that’s 2.5 out of 3smile_tongue)

You can somewhat integrate Google Docs (which includes documents, spreadsheets and presentations) by embedding them into any Google Sites page. You have to enter the specific URL though – why not just select from a list? Furthermore, your Google docs or spreadsheets have to be first made public and you have to use the public URL to embed them into Sites. Here’s my test site, showing first an error message, then the actual embedded spreadsheet, after I made it public.

The embedded docs appear properly in the saved page, but I can’t click on it, not even in Edit mode to get to the source. In fact in Edit mode all I see is a graphical placeholder for the embedded doc.

How about sharing / collaboration? As expected, your Sites can be:

  • private
  • public
  • shared with individual email id’s
  • shared with everyone within your domain

…and you can set view or edit options for all those levels. However, Google missed a big chance again. As a complete coincidence, it’s only yesterday that I raved about Zoho’s Group level sharing, half-announced in a fairly understated manner – hidden in a list of Zoho Writer enhancements. Well, Google already has a very good group facility: Google Groups, which started it’s life as a group discussion / forum system, but it gradually evolved into a decent collaboration platform. Once I have a “group” defined (i.e. the list of members), why doesn’t it become an entity I can share my wiki (sites) or docs with? When I invite users to share the wiki with, there’s an option to save the list as group, but I don’t know where it disappears, can not pull it up either within the wiki or gmail, or docs.

Finally there are gadgets, but if you read Dennis Howlett at ZDNet, gadgets might the feature you don’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. smile_sad

Summary: Nice to have Jot back (even if we did not get GSpot.smile_embaressed ) Google now has a pretty good and easy web-page creator with some wiki features made user-friendly, and a half-hearted attempt at integrating the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release.

Related posts: TechCrunch, eWeek, Ross Mayfield’s Weblog, Irregular Enterprise, Mashable!, InfoWorld, Between the Lines, Portals and KM, CNet, Webware, GigaOM, Web Worker Daily, Venture Chronicles, Insider Chatter, Learning and Technology, Solo Technology.

Comments

  1. GSpot…you are a riot.

    My take is that Google is releasing Google Sites in a “let’s throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” fashion.

    They can afford to do this, since the massive gravitational pull of Google attracts millions of dollars worth of free publicity for anything it does.

    I think this explains the lack of integration with other Google apps…why do the hard work of integration until you’re sure that people are going to really use it.

    Hopefully the added media attention casts extra light on suite vendors like ZoHo as well as collaboration specialists like PBwiki.

    After all, as the leader in on-demand wikis for business and education, PBwiki hosts 450,000 wikis, has thousands of paying customers, and is trusted by paying customers like Facebook, Symantec, DePaul University, and the FDA.

  2. Gary Bridgman says

    Google ought to focus on what it’s already trying to do. The page-editing and file-upload tool for Google Groups has been in meltdown for weeks. It’s up and working on the same schedule as Fallujah Power & Light and more often than not, “successful” edits are reverted within minutes. Check out all the pain in GG’s user group.

  3. Zoli,
    Interesting take, but I don’t agree that the term wiki should be dropped so unceremoniously. Yes, in the long run wiki functionality should just be there, ready and waiting when you need it, but it’s too early to drop it, and Google runs the risk of confusing people even more since it’s not entirely clear to the end user how to classify Sites as a product.

    Stewart

  4. Some of those missing features are available in MediaWiki, which I would personally rather use. Google Sites is an interesting concept, but for the more geeky or control-freak types like myself, it just doesn’t cut it (from what I’ve read; I can’t actually test it, unfortunately).

  5. good news. All i get from google apps for the last 4 hours is “The server encountered an error. Please try again later.” I hope that my docs will be accessible again tomorrow morning. If not, i have to reconsider the whole web cloud idea.

  6. hi,, one thing i am not happy with sites.google.com is,,
    the “change url” is incomplete
    see after redirection
    http://sites.google.com/a/example-domain.com/wiki-name/Home
    should be displayed as
    http://wiki.example-domain.com/wiki-name/Home
    I have made complete CNAME setting,,
    after typing
    http://wiki.example-domain.com/wiki-name/Home
    is automatically converting to
    http://sites.google.com/a/example-domain.com/wiki-name/Home

    Why Google is not doing so,, 🙁

  7. Google Sites itself is very customizable, and for teams that need to collaborate over the net, even with actual Office documents, it works like a charm. However, I’ve seen a few performance issues when testing it with Google Docs integration, though. Google Sites is one impressive piece of web coding, and the feature set is incredibly rich for a free product.

  8. I keep getting

    Google Apps for fooshenergy.ca has already been registered by your domain administrator. Please contact your admin directly to get access to Google Apps services.

    I tried your solution of using

    sites.google.com/a/fooshenergy.ca, but it still gives me the same message as before when I try to sign in.

    What do I do. I own this domain and no-one (to my knowledge) has even signed up. how do I get this reset?

    Please help. I’d really like to get this set up.

    thanks,

    Andrew

  9. Riddle: What do you call a wiki without CamelCase? Certainly not a wiki. That google dropped this essential feature confounds me. Ditto for PBWiki.

Trackbacks

  1. […] JotSpot Born Again as Google Sites, the Wiki-less Wiki […]

  2. […] Zoli Erdos sums it up well: Google now has a pretty good and easy web-page creator with some wiki features made user-friendly, and a half-hearted attempt at integrating the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release. […]

  3. […] that we’re appropriately warned not to use it and just out of curiosity from Zoli Erdos on Google Sites: //OBSTART:do_NOT_remove_this_comment var […]

  4. […] nach 16 Monaten Entwicklung von einem Mega-Unternehmen wie Google etwas mehr erwartet hätten, etwa eine bessere Integration mit den anderen […]

  5. […] the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release says Zoli Erdos he wrote "After 16 months at Google developer's hands, the outcome is substandard. This is […]

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