Justplain

I watched the interview Robert Scoble did with Joe Kraus, CEO and founder of jotspot.com and decided to take jotspot for a testdrive.

It’s very easy to set up an account, you only need to supply them with a username and password and an e-mailaddress and of you are. No need to confirm anything through e-mail. You’ll have a free account up and running within 30 secs.

 You start of with your wiki homepage and you can edit it using a pretty basic wysiwyg editor that has all the features most users will ever need. Some simple text-formating tools, linking to other wikipages, files, webpages, a button for creating new wiki pages, allthough CamelCasing also still works, and of course images.

It looks real nice and intuitive, has some ajax/dhtml feautures build in to make it a even a better experience.

Since jotspot is a wiki, sharing and collaborating are build in feautures. You can easily add users by inviting them: just click on invite, a textbox where you can add the new users emailaddress appears, and with one click they’ll get an invitation by email. In the e-mail the invitee receives is a url, by clicking it the new users is asked to type in a new password, and voila, the new user is redirected to the homepage and ready to go. A community in two minutes

These are no earthshocking things for a wiki, but they all seem to work very easy, intuitive, and are usable by non-tech users, it think.

The extra features is what make jotspot cool i think. Default jotspot comes with 4 ‘applications’ installed:

- calendars: you can create multiple calendars and create events

- File Cabinets: create file cabinets and upload your files into them

- photo pages: Create photo albums und upload your pictures into them (if you click a thumbnail it show the big picture and all the camera details like camera type, shutterspeed etc.)

- spreadsheets: You can start with a blank sheet or copy/paste from your desktopspreadsheet! Allthough it only has half the functionality quatro pro did in 1988 it needs a programmer with a javascript university degree to build such a fancy app in a browser!!

Besides these 4 applications you can install many more, like: project manager, bug reporter, knowledge base, to-do lists, blog, forum, etc. It makes the product really extendable.

When you app is not in the list then you can make a request, and if the jotspot team likes your idea they will build it and add it.

I’ve only been playing arround with jotspot for a small hour so probably i’ve missed half the functionality thats in there. But what i’ve seen is really impressive, and i can recommend you to take a look.

The free account does come with some advertising, but nothing interuptive. You get ten pages and a maximum of 5 users. Enough to test it. If you would want to use it more seriously you’ll have to upgrade your account which starts from 9,99 p/m.

If you want endless pages for nothing and something a bit more nerdy please take a look at SDI. I’ve been using that for some time, and really like it. Specially because of the name which stands for Smart Disorganized Individual

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 7:22 pm and is filed under justplain, wiki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.