Blogs and wikis, Web 2.0 platforms?

Application platforms are very profitable in the software business. Platforms attract developers. Developers build all kinds of interesting applications...which attracts users. Millions of users mean your platform will generate revenues for a long, long time.

Wikis and blogs are great collaboration tools, but they are now moving beyond that to become application platforms. Socialtext and JotSpot (acquired by Google) are building out suites of office productivity applications built on top of a wiki platform. Telligent and Blogtronix are building application platforms on top of the blog model.

Web 2.0 applications are more than just "webifying" existing apps. Web 2.0 applications are inherently interactive and collaborative at every level of the application. They are simple to build, easy to manage, and cheap to maintain. Increasingly they are being built on new platforms like blogs and wikis, and using new tools like AJAX and REST.

Dan Bricklin, inventor of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, has created a new wiki based spreadsheet called WikiCalc. It is not just a spreadsheet with a web interface...it is a web authoring tool that combines the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the visual formatting and data organizing of a spreadsheet.

Jotspot, recently acquired by Google, has built several office productivity applications like spreadsheets, word processors, and project management tools on top of the wiki platform.

Telligent has a blog based application platform called Community Server. The Microsoft StartupZone site  is built on top of Community Server. The site appears to be a standard HTML web site, but it is in fact a collection of blogs that drive interactive content to every section of the web site. Blogtronix is working on a similar blog based platform for enterprises. No web master or HTML skills are required to manage and maintain the site. A simple blog edit window generates all the content and graphics that appear on the site. UPDATE: Robert Scoble has a video interview with Blogtronix and a demo of their platform.

These new wiki and blog based platforms are an example of the promise of Web 2.0. They introduce a whole new way to build collaborative, interactive, web ready applications that can be hosted "in the cloud" or inside the firewall.

Platform shifts happen every 10 to 15 years. We may be witnessing the start of a new platform shift with Web 2.0 style blog and wiki platforms.

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Comments

[Vassil Mladjov]

Don,
You are right. Web 2.0 is a real platform powered by blogs, wikis and social software in general. I am not sure if it is a platform based on content or based on tools and functionality yet. This is a new platform and it is true even more in the enterprise, where our platforms are transforming the way employees are starting to work, communicate, collaborate and share knowledge. This affects the value chain management of the company and increases productivity.
Web 2.0 is a new platform where being virtually connected to your content and your contacts is the most important part of the equation.

We started Blogtronix almost two years a go with the solo idea of creating a web enterprise platform, which combines blogs, wikis, and social networking. Today we have added many new tools (docs, RSS, tags, search, vlogging, etc) and now allow users to even create their own tools and applications within Blogtronix on the fly.

Web 2.0 is a real platform, there is no question about that.

[Dietrich Kappe]

Don,
I agree that the wiki and blog are very powerful tools for a certain kind of collaboration (see http://blogs.pathf.com/agileajax/2006/05/collaborative_s.html).

Where they fail, however, is when the workflow is different or more sophisticated than the simple publish-read-comment form of the blog or the free for all editing of the wiki.

Web-based document management has been around for a long time and the problems of parallel document editing have yet to be resolved in an elegant way. Blogs and Wikis get away from this issue by being largely unstructured. From what I've seen of WikiCalc, it doesn't even try to solve this issue. So unless businesses are willing to do their work with minimally structured blogs and wikis, the hard work is yet to be done.

[Dennis Howlett]

I'm with Vassil on this. They've done for me what it was taking ages to get done elsewhere. Guess what, they're on .NET - but I guess you knew that :)

[Robert Scoble]

Don, funny, I have two videos up with Blogtronix today on http://www.scobleshow.com.

[Rosie]

These comments have been invaluable to me as is this whole site. I thank you for your comment.