Google Doc : versioning through copy-and-paste for creating new documents

Wiki : versioning in-place (overlapping versioning)

Just to help me to think about “Google Doc” and Wiki.

Once WYSIWYG HTML editors will be included inside wikis, the distance with Google Doc will be shortened. Then, at least one difference remains: the versioning way-of-document-life you mention. OK, there is a difference, but I think wikis can support also the “Google Doc” way. I see it as a plus: wikis have a good potential, even if today’s wikis are not so much user-friendly…

The other wiki advantage I see is the API wikis offer. The wiki API enables integration and worflow definition. For example, imagine the following use case: (1) users post questions for a FAQ, using WYSIWYG editors, (2) questions are forwarded to an internal project mailing list, or to an RSS/Atom feed (through integration provided by wiki API), (3) project developers react while defining a response through the same editor.

That’s a use case I really like to see implemented as FAQs looks like often quite dead, or too much static. And as a consequence, I think mailing lists are sometimes polluted with some questions that might be also answered through FAQ and then, alleviate the burden of project developers.

It looks like advanced editor/wiki integration has potential.

– Dominique

This is a quote from an email from the JotSpot team:

“We’re writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you’ll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we’re focused on migrating JotSpot to Google’s systems and datacenters. We’ll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won’t be inconvenienced.

Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?
=================================
Google shares JotSpot’s vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot’s team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Groups.
What does this mean for JotSpot customers?

We believe that joining Google will accelerate our team’s vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web. Google shares that vision and presents us with the world’s best environment for delivering on it. We’ll be taking advantage of Google’s world-class systems infrastructure and operations expertise to ensure that access to your JotSpot is fast and reliable. We can’t share any of our plans publicly just yet, but we can tell you that we’re incredibly excited about the possibilities. We can’t think of a better company to have been acquired by.

Will paying customers still be charged?
=========================================
We will no longer be billing customers for the use of the service. Although you will still have use of the product at your current pricing plan, we won’t charge you anymore when your current billing cycle expires.

What about security and privacy?
=================================

Your data is yours — that doesn’t change at Google. We will continue to work to ensure the privacy and security of your data. Furthermore, Google is as committed to privacy and security as we are. Since the user information you provided to JotSpot will soon be transferred to Google as part of their acquisition of JotSpot, we want to provide you with the opportunity to retrieve your user information and cease usage of the JotSpot service before the transition. If you do not wish to continue using JotSpot, send an email to privacy@jot.com in the next sixty days and we will reply with instructions for retrieving your user information.

Answers to more frequently asked questions are available at http://www.jot.com/. If you have any other questions, please email support@jot.com.

In closing, we wanted to offer our sincere gratitude to you — our customers — for believing in us and helping us achieve success. We look forward to continuing that relationship at Google.

Best wishes,
The JotSpot Team”

First, I fully agree with your comment about implementing a Captcha instead of requiring a login. This just is one of those thing that seems to never get quite high enough on our priority list.

Technically, Wikis and documents on Google Docs can be quite similar, I agree. You could use Google Docs as a Wiki, always inviting the same set of people to collaborate on every document you create, and adding links between documents, thus creating a whole. However this is not how people are using Google Docs: they create a document, share it with a few other people. Create another document, share it with another set of people. At some point the first document is not relevant anymore, and nobody uses it anymore. It just stays there for reference, just like an other email thread.

Pages on a Wiki are not unlike pages of a book: by design they form a whole. When a new editions of the book comes out, new pages are added, some old pages are removed, but overall all pages are (or should be) updated along the way to keep the whole consistent.

You can see Google Docs as an evolution on the Wikis as they are today. But because the work flow that happens around documents on Google Docs is so different than what happens on Wikis, I like to see those as two different branches, on the same “collaboration tools” tree. And if I had to bet on the one I think will be the most successful, you know which one I would pick. :)

Alex

I won’t respond on the Wiki part, since that’s Alex’s article ;-) Regarding the blog comments, you are right, logging in is a pain, and probably discourages people to post comments (I constantly have to login on people’s blogs when I have to post comments, and you really have to badly want to post a comment to go through that.) I believe that initially we setup the comments to be more open, and closed them a bit after we started getting too much spam. We should check how we can configure WordPress to behave in a more user-friendly manner.

-Erik

What a title: “What Google Didn’t Do: A Wiki”! That’s such a match, wiki within the Google perspective, I would like very much to have written about it myself ;-)

Reading your post puts me to think about this match and I disagree gently about your post’s thesis.

I don’t buy the fact that “Google Doc” is so much more document-oriented than a wiki. In fact, I think Google has just built a wiki! Wikipedia just says: “A wiki is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration”.

I think Google is just reinventing the wiki concept. Enhancing the wiki experience while proposing a better implementation. Google does not disagree on the wiki concept, but disagrees with the common implementation out there.

Death to the wiki! Long live the wiki!

There is an interesting French post out there: “Syntax wiki is not any more what it was” (”La syntaxe wiki n’est plus ce qu’elle était”) : http://ljouanneau.com/blog/2006/06/28/573-la-syntaxe-wiki-nest-plus-ce-quelle-etait

Old-style wiki implementations have failed to attract a massive audience, due to the boring syntax. That’s not surprising wiki implementation is revivified by Google as Google lives through the analysis of a *massive* number of documents, and then, needs the production of plenty of documents. The other point that puts me to think “Google doc” is not that much different than a wiki, is that “Google doc”-ed web sites are going to suffer from the same difficulties than a wiki.

OK, Google Doc is going to allow web sites to have more documents than a wiki, then such “Google doc”-ed web sites would appear more lively, and, OK, Google search engine, that is better than wiki search engines, would help to dig into plenty of documents. But, at the end, problems are just moved a bit further, not removed. Just because quantity is not quality. While helping to manipulate documents because providing a better experience, it’s not enough to put plenty of documents on a web site to make it a reader-friendly web site.

Don’t get me wrong! I just see “Google Doc” as a very, very good step into the right direction, providing mass-market tools. Indeed, so far I have been happy with very, very few wikis. And recently, I have even thought wikis will have to face even more problems while the web semantic is raising, while keeping their weird syntax.

What I would like strongly to see next is document-oriented refactoring tools. The problems that “Google doc”-ed web sites are going to face, just like wikis before, are related to document organization (i.e. relationships). “Split” and “merge” functions, with versioning, should be welcome. “Move” function is harder to implement, but it should be welcome too. It is harder to implement because with refactoring, documents may move fast, and one could want to retrieve the document he/she was reading at some date (but, it should possible to include a timestamp into the URL so that, while a reader is requesting a document at a date, the web site should be able to compare this date with the last modified date of the document to propose the user to view, or not, an updated document).

Solutions exist, to enable better collaboration. Google Doc is a good step forward, let’s hope other steps will follow ;-)

The point I am not happy with, is that Google tools are not open source. Well, even wikis are evolving. I have read xwiki is going to include a WYSIWYG editor (see Google Summer of Code program - http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Dev/SummerOfCode). All collaborative tools are evolving in a similar good way (sure, it looks like old-style wiki days are close to end).

– Dominique

PS : being logged for posting comments is a bit frustating. While I guess, you are using this technique for avoiding spam, why not using a Captcha instead ? While Google is improving the wiki experience, it could be worth to extend your blog experience while simplifying the comment production ;-) Thanks. Note that a “preview” mode would be welcome, too. With information about authorized post syntax.