Almost four months after Google acquired JotSpot, business users and commercial developers of this hosted wiki service give mixed accounts of life as Google customers.
Some report technical improvements in their wikis, while others complain about serious Web site availability problems. Most are eager to find out what Google plans to do with JotSpot, because they have a lot riding on that decision.
"As customers, we've gotten very little feedback about product strategy and direction for JotSpot. That's concerning right now," said James Brennan, president of Mandalan Media, in Culver City, California.
Google declined to answer questions for this story but provided via e-mail a statement saying that while it would make sense to integrate JotSpot into current products, "we have no plans to share just yet." The JotSpot team is focused on moving the service to the Google infrastructure "to take advantage of greater reliability and scalability" and eager to provide customers with updates about JotSpot "as soon as possible," the statement reads.
Google acquired JotSpot in October of last year, saying that the wiki technology was "a strong fit" with the Google Groups discussion forum and with the Google Apps suite of hosted communication and collaboration applications. Wikis, which are Web sites that multiple users can edit, have become popular collaboration tools in workplaces. JotSpot, founded in 2004, allows people to design wikis with visual tools, without needing programming knowledge. JotSpot wikis can have multiple applications and components in them, such as spreadsheets, calendars, documents and photo galleries.
At the time of the acquisition, JotSpot had an installed base of thousands of businesses, including Mandalan Media, which built its commercial video sharing site Strmz.com on the JotSpot platform and launched it in early 2006. Since the Google acquisition, the site suffers about two hours of downtime per week. Because of this months-long situation the company is considering migrating the site to another platform, said Brennan, who otherwise raves about JotSpot, calling it a "phenomenal" product.
Strmz.com, which gets anywhere between 5,000 and 20,000 visitors per day, generates revenue from advertising, so if it's unavailable, Mandalan loses money. Mandalan generates about 10 percent of its total revenue from Strmz.com. Its other JotSpot wikis, which get much less traffic and are used for its interactive media consulting and producing business, haven't suffered performance problems.
Payscroll.com, a startup developing a yet unreleased career and job-related Web site, actually has seen a performance improvement in its JotSpot wiki since the Google acquisition, said Alfred Toh, the company's co-founder. Payscroll adopted JotSpot in October 2006 and has about 5 users on it, mostly for internal work. "Before, page loading could be slow, but right now it's great," Toh said.
Toh is also happy with Google's decision to make the service free for all users and put everyone on the same level of service, which for him meant an upgrade. Now, he is allowed to have an unlimited number of JotSpot pages as well as unlimited storage and applications. "That's one of the best things that's come across so far," Toh said.
However, others feel this has removed their leverage as paying customers.
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