Congratulations to Ross and his team. Socialtext continues to plow ahead in its push to become the dominant engine for enterprise-class wikis. Today they had dual announcements; both significant.
Opening up the Kimono...Socialtext launches Socialtext Open
Whether you've known Ross for years or just met him, it's a safe bet you've gathered that he's passionate about the power of social computing and equally so about open source. Today's announcement is a big leap for an enterprise, for-profit startup to make, but I'm inclined to think it was the right one. In essence, Socialtext has now opened itself for all to see, test, build upon, extend and utilize.
According to Ross:
Socialtext Open changes everything. Including the way we are going to communicate, with nothing to hide and sharing our Public Roadmap. While Open is still in Beta and we don't know the full impact this release will have, my hope is it fulfills our goal of wikis everwhere and cultivates a broader developer community.
Showing us some skin...Socialtext launches a better UI experience via "skins"
As a Socialtext user, I LOVE this news. Socialtext is allowing custom CSS (for you bloggers out there, you know what a difference custom CSS can make). Frankly, the issue I've had with wikis, particularly in terms of their becoming ubiquitous in larger organizations, has been the lack of a customizable, slick user interface. Some other wiki companies, like Wetpaint, have attacked the UI experience head on, but frankly no one else has the underlying functionality that Socialtext offers; at least as far as I can tell.
Jeff has a solid take on this news:
One of the complaints that is often heard about Socialtext is that the user interface is not well designed. I’m not going to disagree with this sentiment, in fact I have said as much to Ross, but at the same time I want to recognize that the company has not been sitting idle. Beginning next month you will see some significant updates to Socialtext, both the hosted service and the enterprise version.
It is also important to dig into the “UI sucks” complaint to understand what exactly people are referring to when they refer to user experience. Let’s be clear about one thing, Socialtext arguably has the broadest feature set of any of the major wiki platforms, enabling blogging, e-mail integration, security, embedded feeds, and much more; it’s a challenge to design a user interface for an application with a deep feature set. From my own experience I would say that the text editor is the center of any frustration I have, I would like to see wikiwyg enhanced in many ways, including more predictability in the “simple” mode, support for inline attachments, better image support, and a customizable toolbar that enables the user to select what editor features they want displayed.
Keep up the good work...
socialtext wiki rossmayfield open source web2.0 enterprise2.0 woodrow skins
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