Seattle-based Wetpaint opened its doors today to show off a few sample sites that use its new, super-slick wiki platform.
You can get a good overview of how users interact with wiki’s built on the platform by going through the rather tedious tour. Basically, its a highly user-friendly wysiwyg-type wiki platform. To see an example wiki, check out the xbox 360 site they’ve created.
This is a hosted wiki solution, and Wetpaint’s business model is to add contextual advertising to each page of the wiki.
The company was founded last year and is backed by Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures. See Silicon Beat, John Cook and Zoli Erdos for more.
Thanks Michael,
We’ll have to work on shortening that tour. To clarify where we’re headed, we will offer users their own free hosted sites (on our servers, but under complete user/community control) when we do our full “1.0″ launch release. Until then, we’ll be using these first beta sites to get lots of user feedback.
–Ben
Looks great, but this lacks the same features the other wikis lack - the ability to upload files to the Wiki inline.
Is this the TechCrunch effect I’m seeing now?
“We’re busy making improvements.
Please check back soon!” with dead hostImg
How is this better than socialtext or wikipedia? Granted with wikipedia you have to host it yourself.
What market is WetPaint going after? One for corporate networks? Social ones like the wikifido.com link?
The interface looks pretty smooth.
I prefer:
pbwiki.com
Make your own wiki in less time that it takes to make a pb&j.
Up for months. Check it out.
-Ian
Nice, clean, and easy to use. I like how they use small DHTML “palettes” to show tool options.
It might not have much innovative in features (though I have never seen tagging and hierarchy features in the same wiki), but the way they have put everything together with wysiwig editing and easy to use features should make it more accessible for anyone to edit. Basically, it looks like they have brought wikis to a point where anyone can use them. They really put a lot of work and innovation into this one, and I hope they do well.
Hmmmm, I don’t see anything very nice here. It has an almost form-based look/feel to its interface. I agree that http://pbwiki.com is much nicer, more open. I also like http://www.stikipad.com quite a lot. It’s Rails-based, and yes it does allow inline uploading of files.
If it’s true, btw, that they raised $5.25m to build this application, I’m kinda blown away. I doubt there’s $100K invested in pbwiki and stikipad combined! How can this company be successful enough to provide a meaningful return on a standard vc investment (i.e. make $50m on the $5m invested). Too bad.
Tom - Good Point. the numbers do not make sense.
The code it produces could be cleaned up a bit. For example, text could be wrapped in paragraph tags, and two line breaks could start a new paragraph (which seems to be a common expectation among users) rather than inserting two line breaks. The edit-in-place functionality is certainly cool, however.
“You can get a good overview of how users interact with wiki’s built on the platform by going through the rather tedious tour.”
wiki’s or wikis?
Run a grammar check too.
Looks like it has potential, but could be a little neater.
Looks really good, but thats all I can say about it … that it looks really good. I don’t see any addition in functionality, and its much slower to load than Wikipedia or the likes.
Nothing too big, but will be amazing if made faster!
Admittedly, the Ajax is really nifty. The editing interface is superb. However, I find the rest of the interface to be complex, and bewildering, much more so than say, Wikipedia’s. True, in order to type in wikipedia you effectively have to learn a new markup code, but it only opens a single box on the screen. Really good job on the javascript though
The application looks nice, but it somewhat looks as a rehash of MediaWiki with many improvements and/or “Web 2.0″ elements in the interface.
I agree with the above comment by James about the complexity of it.
I have been using stikipad myself to create and collaborate documents and projects, and it is a great, easy to use and pleasant application.
Stikipad is almost like three 37signals products combined: (Writeboard, TaDa and Backpack). You have to learn the markup of Textile but, Textile is a simple markup language.
Very nice, I like the WYSIWYG VERY much. Will there be a downloadable version that will be installed server-side? Or do you ONLY host it?
Also, what will pricing options be? I work on an open-source project (wc3mods.net) and have been looking to use a wiki that is simple for my users to edit, mediawiki isn’t the easiest to use b/c of the markup language. Your solution looks quite nice but of course I’d have to be able to afford it since it’s an open-source project.
Ideas on pricing?
Neato, a wiki.
Yawn.
$5 Mill?!?, I bet the owners have nice cars now.
What Tom Mandel said about pbwiki and stikipad.
Jotspot is head-and-shoulders above WetPaint, though a vastly more complex application.
This is a pitiful puff piece; not representative I hope of your other work which I had thought was decent before this.
What do you think of seedwiki?
I disagree with the naysayers. I’m a LEGO maniac myself and just registered with Wetpaint’s BrickiWiki. I anticipate any kinks will be worked out soon enough. In the mean time, I like this interface so much better than Wikipedia’s.
Come on, you have to admit- it’s a lot prettier to look at than Wikipedia, too. Plus, it combines nice features from blogs that helps to foster more of a community feel. Wikipedia is sterile to me and the mods are such fascists!
For those of you who have looked at Brickiwiki, there is a site called Brickwiki (http://www.brickwiki.org) that has both more users and precedes Brickiwiki.