Google's continued silence about JotSpot has diminished this lauded wiki product's market visibility and risks alienating existing customers at a time when interest in wikis from corporate IT buyers has hit an all-time high, analysts, users, and developers warn.

Soon after Google acquired JotSpot in October, it closed new signups for the hosted wiki service and went mum about its plans. Seven months later, JotSpot customers and developers crave information about JotSpot plans and grapple with various degrees of availability and performance problems.

Meanwhile, JotSpot competitors like Socialtext aggressively market their wares as interest rises among CIOs about wikis, which are Web sites that multiple users can edit and that have become popular workplace collaboration tools.

Joe Kraus, JotSpot's cofounder, wants everyone to know that his team is working hard to integrate JotSpot's systems into the Google infrastructure.

"I'm as eager as any of our users are," said Kraus, now a Google product management director for collaboration applications. "At a personal level, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm impatient by nature. I feel an absolute sense of urgency."

The decision to close signups and remain silent on JotSpot's future was made so that Kraus and his team could focus on migrating the hosted wiki service over to Google, he said.

"You can't successfully divide your attention between porting your software [to Google] and supporting an inflow of new customers," he said. "It was the right decision to make, although we love the product and we wanted people to continue to use it."

Still, he declined to say when Google will announce its JotSpot intentions and reopen it for new customers. It is widely assumed that JotSpot will become part of Google Apps, the hosted suite of communication and collaboration applications for organizations that includes e-mail, instant messaging, calendaring, word processing, and spreadsheet software and will soon offer a presentations tool.

In the meantime, rival Socialtext is wasting no time attempting to capitalize on JotSpot's sabbatical, running the following text ad in Google's search engine for wiki-related queries: "JotSpot off the mark? Sign-up for a risk-free, 30-day trial of Socialtext's business wiki -- www.socialtext.com."

Maybe Google is finding it harder than expected to integrate JotSpot into its infrastructure, Forrester Research analyst Oliver Young said. Whatever it is, the timing is unfortunate. "The wiki market is more alive than it's ever been. JotSpot and Google are definitely missing an opportunity right now," Young said.

Application developer Knowesys generates about 40 percent of its revenue from JotSpot-related work but has seen a decline in client interest for the product, which it attributes to the prolonged post-acquisition silence, said Kathleen Romano, Knowesys' founder. "The buzz is definitely slowing down. We're not seeing as many [customer] requests as we used to," she said.

Ironically, enterprises' interest in wikis generally has risen significantly, Romano said. She hopes Google will soon make noise for JotSpot in the market. "The JotSpot technology is amazing. It's better than anything else out there," she said.

The Last Mile Group's JotXPert group has been developing JotSpot commercial and custom applications for more than two years, and currently, JotSpot-related work generates about a third of the company's revenue.

"Customers keep asking for wiki applications to be built using the Jot platform. Despite all the caveats and warnings that Google has given, and that we in turn give to our clients, they remain committed. I think they realize, as we have, that the Jot technology is far superior to other offerings and that they're willing to take the risk." said David E. Antila, CTO at The Last Mile.