Hosted Wikis

Social website tools

I think it's a safe assumption that at some point in time you have used Wikipedia if only out of curiosity. The power of Wikipedia has been the crowd sourcing and community editing functionality, allowing group collaboration to monitor, edit and update the data on an ongoing basis. There is a growing list of sites that offer hosted wikis with increasing levels of functionality and rapid development and deployment tools.

One of the new entries in this arena is Wetpaint, calling their service "hosted social media". What is compelling about Wetpaint is their Wetpaint Injected, a widget-ized version of their service that can be embedded into your blog, MySpace, Facebook, etc. website. Wetpaint has some very easy to use tools for creating a professional-looking media rich social website. Another entry in this space is the former Jotspot, purchased by Google that has re-emerged as Google Sites. The current drawback to Google Sites is the requirement to have a qualified domain name in order to register for the service, and in effect Google is targeting the business community with Sites instead of individual users. *Update note: 5/22 - after this post, Google announced that Sites was accessible to individual users via their Google Apps login.

Wikis are emerging as a web-based, hosted alternative to MS Sharepoint or Lotus Quickr tools for team and group collaboration. Other popular hosted personal wiki services are PBwiki, Scribblewiki and Zoho Wiki just to name a few.

Sites like Socialtext and CentralDesktop are targeted at business users with pricing starting at around $10/user per month.