Justplain

Google must have read my review and decided to spend some cash and become the owner of JotSpot

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