It seems Google will re-launch Jotspot as Google Wiki this coming week. Excellent. Finally, some competition. 
Since JotSpot was swallowed up by big G there has been one player innovating in the wiki space: MindTouch. If you’re new to MindTouch Deki Wiki download it and see for yourself (you can install in under 10 minutes). Or review some of our architectural videos. You will be impressed. I’m looking forward to seeing what the JotSpot guys have been up to for the last year. Are they close to competing with MindTouch’s technology? Being closed source is certainly a disadvantage.
MindTouch is a force to be reckoned with now and in the coming years. Our technology has attracted a remarkably strong community of users and developers in a very short time. We’ve done this, in part, by being open source, which means we release our source code for peer review, make our bugs public, and engage our community of users in driving the development of our products. Being open source does not guarantee a thriving community. The fact is if you’re open source it is even more important that you have a rock solid technology that’s interesting. You can not fool or dazzle developers with a flood of spin about your product. This may work in the “Web 2.0″ world for a short time, but it simply does not fly when you’re exposing your source code for peer review. You do not have to look far for a good example of this.
Deki Wiki has a ground breaking web-services extension modeled that allows users to create interesting and powerful application mashups. For example, users can compose applications from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in a wiki page with content they author or aggregate from databases, other applications, or from across the Web. This aspect of Deki Wiki is so rich with potential that people are just beginning to realize what we’ve built. Mashups in Deki Wiki are easy to achieve and infinite in scope. To be honest, in the coming years I’m certain our users will be surprising us with what they do with our platform.
Deki Wiki is the first platform in the wiki collaboration and social media space. Not only is it the most extensible, but Deki Wiki has the first complete and open API. All the functionality of Deki Wiki is exposed through an open and REST-based API. The Deki Wiki platform is growing so fast it’s becoming a challenge just to keep up with all the extensions. In just over a month MindTouch has delivered dozens of extensions to external applications. These add almost 100 new features to Deki Wiki. Documenting these is quite a chore.
MindTouch Deki Wiki has the most versatile deployment options. It’s platform independent and can be installed from source on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, or BSD. Or for a remarkably easy install you can use the VMware certified image and be up and running on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X (Intel-based) in under 10 minutes. MindTouch also offers a hosted environment.
MindTouch is carving out a growing niche with social media and enterprises in the burgeoning wiki space. As the use of wikis become more mainstream and widespread discerning users will look for an open, extensible, and flexible solution. Many will find MindTouch and join the several hundreds of organizations that deploy MindTouch Deki Wiki every day.
One final note, those who are using Google-powered applications would be well advised to read the terms of service carefully, especially regarding the rights to the content.
[...] Google Wiki | MindTouch Blog (tags: jotspot google wiki mindtouch dekiwiki) [...]
Pingback by links for 2007-09-04 | O(b Log N) — September 4, 2007 @ 11:21 am
You seem worried about Google. If I were you I would be worried about Atlassian’s Confluence and Jive’s Clearspace. They are your real competitors and they seem to be getting a lot of high profile customers. Also, I disagree with you that you’re the only player innovating but I can understand your bias
Comment by Ryan Ackley — September 4, 2007 @ 2:18 pm
Ryan,
Thanks for the comment. Actually, I’ll be surprised if MindTouch Deki Wiki ends up competing directly with a Google Wiki. I would agree that it does compete with Clearspace and Confluence. Download Deki Wiki. Test drive it. Or check out this video: http://wiki.opengarden.org/Deki_Wiki/Release/Hayes/ I’m confident you’ll agree with the several hundreds of companies that are adopting Deki Wiki every day. Feel free to review the stats.
I notice you develop and sell a plugin for Confluence. You should consider adapting this for Deki Wiki. With about 500 downloads a day (and growing) it’s a sizable market to target.
Comment by Aaron Fulkerson — September 4, 2007 @ 9:40 pm
this is probably not the best place for commenting on Deki wiki, but having looking around for a bit I haven’t found a better one. I ran into your post while looking for the long expected Google wiki.
I’ve tried Deki some weeks ago and after a first attempt just decided to drop it. I take the time to write this comment because I think Deki wiki is a good tool and it does fill an existing gap into the wiki world.
The install is very easy as you claim, the use of a virtualizer a bit unusual but very efficient. I ran into some problems/questions regarding IP affectation and dtabase backup but I’m sure it can be solved easily.
When I tried to create my first pages I quickly realized there was no other way than the WYSIWYG as for linking pages. This is way to cumbersome for me, I’m too used to CamelCase keywords or markup/metalanguage syntax (whatever it is, it’s always quick to learn the basic: how to interlink pages) to create my hierarchy of page/idea/topic. This is the force of a wiki engine: this single basic feature is essential. So I dropped it because I couldn’t find out an efficient way of editing.
I understand your loud claim that a wiki must be good looking and easy to use , but for me and in the enterprise word it must also be efficient!
So please, don’t decide for the user what is good or not! I’m sure there’re many like me around that knows how to use a markup language and are very good at it.
Please give us a markup language for fast editing!
Comment by Jean Seurin — September 5, 2007 @ 9:21 pm
Jean,
Thanks for your comments and interest in Deki Wiki. I appreciate you taking the time to write this.
Great news! You can create links in Deki Wiki with the same alacrity provided by wikitext. There are two ways:
1). Use wikitext. E.g.- [[Link to my page]], we convert this to a valid XHTML hyperlink on save, but you can still use this.
2). Hotkey. Select the text: “Link to my page”, click ctrl-w (or the equivalent Apple key sequence). This will link your text to the page.
Our community of Gardeners at http://www.opengardener.com, which I strongly encourage you to join, was a primary driver in our keeping the wikitext syntax for linking.
Deki Wiki does have a killer WYSIWYG and if you like you can use only this for all your authoring and aggregating. But for power users you can always edit in HTML by switching to this mode. Deki Wiki does not store in wikitext because it is non-standard and we don’t see a need to invent a new markup language when HTML (XHTML really) already does everything a user could possibly want. Also, why learn a new skill when you’ve already honed your HTML/CSS and it’s far more versatile than wikitext?
Comment by Aaron Fulkerson — September 6, 2007 @ 9:39 am
Hi,
I now tried to run the vm and it looks great!
How do you search with regular expressions in DekiWiki? Wiki format is a very true-to-text format and regular expression searches is very important I thinks.
Storing everything as XHTML is a very interesting approach, and it seems to work. But I am afraid of how easy this format is to export into a more regular wiki-text markup (like for instance http://www.wikicreole.org/) if I one day in the futur want to upgrade to TWiki or another wiki-engine?
Keep up the great work!
Mit besten Grüßen,
Klaus
Comment by Klaus Mühlbach — September 6, 2007 @ 4:42 pm
Klaus,
Thanks for taking the time to share.
We store in XHTML, this is XML. This is a universal standard. We are passionate about open and standard data formats and open source. I am familiar with creole. Wikitext of any sort is not a standard and differs from wiki to wiki. Creole is a good thing, but I think it’s unnecessary. We already have HTML, see comment #5 on this page.
I can not imagine you will ever want to use any wiki that can’t understand XML. This would be ill-advised.
As for search. Deki Wiki uses Lucene to index pages and file attachments. To find out more about this enterprise class search indexer visit the Apache Foundation’s Lucene site or click the “Developer” tab at the top of this page. Here you will find a very active community and documentation about Deki Wiki search.
Comment by Aaron Fulkerson — September 6, 2007 @ 11:22 pm
Sounds like there is a breakup going on between original-style wiki markup and experimenting-style XHTML now. I thinks we will just have to see to which degree it is going to be possible to easily migrate between options - for me it is just too early to experiment with.
I can see from its documentation that Lucene doesn’t really have a concept of a string, so definetely no regular expressions - it says: “Lucene supports single and multiple character wildcard searches within single terms (not within phrase queries).”
Anyway, I have been trying out your wiki a bit during the day and I would like to give some feedback:
Files:
I uploaded a file called: “Klaus Mühlbach file.txt”, but when I wanted to download it again the filename was altered:
Windows Internet Explorer downloads it as “Klaus_Mühlbach_file.txt”, Mozilla Firefox downloads it as “1.htm”. - I think it should be possible to get your uploaded file back without any corruptions?
Stability:
I have had a few cases of “Your wiki is down” and apparently the only way to get the service back is restarting the vm?
Privacy:
It looks like there’s lots and lots of callbacks in the code used that will “phone home” - I don’t think this is playing nice (google analytics, e-mails and others). For my own part I will be very reluctant to try out your vm again until it is more privacy-ready.
It’s been an interesting ride trying out your wiki - it looks greats, but has some issues imho.
Mit besten Grüßen,
Klaus
Comment by Klaus Mühlbach — September 7, 2007 @ 11:03 am
Thanks for the feedback Klaus. All the remote calls can be configured from the Services Control Panel. We pre-configured several remote services to provide examples of how registering remote services works. Feel free to turn them off in the control panel or run these somewhere you feel comfortable.
The “file corruption” issue you cite is two fold. One instance is caused by you “saving the link as” instead of just clicking the file. Just click the file to open/save it. The other file example you gave in which the file name was changed looks like a localization issue. Although the Deki Wiki has had language packs provided by the community for French, German, and Russian MindTouch has not vetted these languages yet. Although the Hayes+ release probably solves this issue. If I recall correctly there are a lot of localization fixes going into this release, which is due out next week.
By the way, there’s also a new desktop connector / file explorer that allows you to drag/drop manage your file attachments.
As for wiki down, I suspect you’ve likely installed the VM on a laptop and you are changing networks periodically. Without getting into the technical details of this with VMware allow me to simply state: switching networks with VMware will cause problems unless you setup a static IP and run in NAT.
Finally, the most suitable place for this kind of dialog is here: http://forums.opengarden.org . Again, thanks for you evaluation Klaus.
Comment by Aaron Fulkerson — September 7, 2007 @ 1:18 pm
[...] for Google’s Wiki. I spoke on this topic previously when it was last rumored to launch. I’ll not repeat the hearsay I’ve been privy to, but [...]
Pingback by eWeek: Google Wiki, Where Art Thou? | MindTouch Blog — November 13, 2007 @ 12:15 pm