As co-founders of Excite.com, Graham Spencer and Joe Kraus had learned a thing or two about transformative technologies. But
that’s not what they had in mind when they started JotSpot, the first application Wiki.
“When we left Excite in 2000 we were working on a couple of different projects, and we used a Wiki to manage our conversations
about them,” says Spencer, CTO of JotSpot. “At first we thought Wikis weren’t very interesting. But as we started using them,
we discovered they’re really transformative in how they allow you to collaborate on projects.”
As do all Wikis, JotSpot allows you to create new documents for others to edit, or edit files others have created. So instead
of e-mailing spreadsheets around and wondering who has the latest version or what changes were made, you can post the worksheet
to the Wiki, where the latest version is always available and all changes can be easily traced to their source.
But JotSpot takes the Wiki concept and applies it to building applications. For example, you can take that simple spreadsheet
and turn each row into its own Wiki page, complete with links to other documents. You can e-mail files directly to your page
and set up an RSS feed to alert you when someone else makes changes. You can import free prefab applications such as a group
calendar, contact manager, help desk, project manager, and more, and then customize them with a few clicks — no programming
required.
And if somebody screws up, you can just roll back to the previous version. No harm, no foul.
“We want to give people confidence they can build their own app and modify it, like the way blogs gave people the feeling
they could publish their own content without having to learn HTML,” Spencer says. “And making it safe to make changes is a
really important part of that.”
He says many of JotSpot’s 15,000 customers start out using the Wiki for simple things like keeping track of office supplies
or managing conference room schedules. But before long, they begin importing spreadsheets and customizing prefab applications.
For Spencer, it’s a natural next step in the evolution of the Web, from using search tools to find and view documents, to
creating your own content, and then finally building applications that solve real problems.
“I think you’ll increasingly see people using the Web to build functional spaces as opposed to simply building documents,”
Spencer says. “We believe there is a huge latent market for applications that people will want to build, and I think we have
a good tool for that.”
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