JotBlog

One thing in Ross’s post merited a comment here: he says that we’re “old school” for thinking that we can convince developers to build on our closed-source platform.

I’d like to suggest instead that it’s “old school” to focus exclusively on the openness of the code when the openness of the data is at least as important. Aren’t Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, Google, Amazon, and Ebay closed-source platforms, and haven’t they spurred some of the most interesting “innovation at the edge” that we’ve seen in the past couple of years?

I’m certainly not the first to notice this. Steve Mallet, Jeremy Zawodny and Jon Udell have all made similar points. Tim O’Reilly offers an excellent summary of this vision:

Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story. We must understand the impact of such factors as standards and their effect on commoditization, system architecture and network effects, and the development practices associated with software as a service.

The reason that Flickr, del.icio.us, et al. have spawned innovation is that they exemplify the approach of using open standards to build software-as-service. Put more simply, it’s very easy to get your stuff in and out. You can use the Flickr API to show images on a map (in more than one way). The del.icio.us API lets you build a few different blog integration tools, a Firefox plugin, and all kinds of other stuff. You can find many more examples by using another popular example of software-as-service.

When we debuted at Web 2.0, we described JotSpot as being part of a network of small pieces, loosely joined. We showed how you can get data into our system via SMTP, REST, RSS, SOAP, XML-over-HTTP-transformed-with-XSLT – take your pick. And since day 1 we’ve been able to transform your wiki’s data back into any of those formats. In fact, we make it as easy as possible for you to dump your entire wiki to your hard drive at any time (formatted nicely as XHTML, with all revisions and attachments included).

We believe that open data is at least as important as open code, and we’ve already demonstrated a solid commitment to that vision. I think that’s “new school.”

PS: This is not to say that open source is unimportant. Our platform contains many open-source components, we’ve financed major contributions to free software, and some of our employees spend significant fractions of their day managing open-source projects. We’ll have some interesting announcements about open source in the future.

There’s a meme floating around that we’re seeing a return to the madness of 1999: ridiculous valuations, massive investments, hypergrowth, etc. I don’t know if that’s true or not – there may be a bit of evidence in that direction, but I think it’s too early to tell. Regardless, my own experiences with bubble excesses have made me very keen to avoid repeating history. In fact, Joe and I often worry that we’re “fighting the last war” by trying to make the company too lean.

So I was surprised and disappointed by the tone of Matt Marshall’s latest article on the “wiki war.” He’s trying to paint a David and Goliath story with one scrappy company that stayed “hunkered down” with “only” 10 people, working from home; then comes the hulking behemoth of JotSpot (surely hiring like it’s 1999 – oh wait, we have 10 employees too), throwing around millions of dollars from “big-name venture capital firms” and “boasting” about our features.

The article was prompted by news that a big company dropped SocialText to use JotSpot instead. So I should first say that yes, we are thrilled and I think justifiably proud that Disney prefers our product to SocialText’s. We’re also embarrassed about the leak of the news. (I’m told that we can blame our PR group for misunderstanding us on that one, but I don’t want to scold them about it because otherwise they’ve done a fantastic job.)

To correct some inaccuracies from the article:

• We are not in Palo Alto “all the better to lure away employees” from SocialText. We’re in Palo Alto because most of our employees live here (or in nearby cities). We like being able to bike to work. (A little fact-checking would have made it even more obvious that we’re not in Palo Alto to “lure” SocialText employees: many of SocialText’s employee’s don’t even live in the Bay Area.)
• Despite the implication of lavishly-funded office space, we only moved out of our houses when a venture capital company was kind enough to let us squat in their incubator space for free. We eventually outgrew that space, so we’ve been in our new offices for a few months. (Sadly the new place is more expensive than free and a lot less luxurious than a VC office.) In any event, I personally think there’s value to having all of our employees in one place, especially when our rent averages out to a few lattes per employee per day.
• “A dozen more specialists:” We have paid a handful of open-source committers to add features to their projects, and we give those features back to the community. (While we’re on the topic, I should mention that two of our full-time employees spend significant fractions of their JotSpot time managing open-source projects.)
• Most importantly, Ross agrees with us that Disney did not pick JotSpot because we had more venture money – they picked us because we had features they wanted.

Yes, we raised venture capital money; but the relevant question about venture money is not how much we raised but how long it will last us. Having the money in the bank doesn’t mean we’re spending it like drunken sailors. (At least I hope Joe isn’t – but where did that mahogany desk come from?)

Clearly JotSpot and SocialText are rivals, but we have very different strategies: JotSpot is adding structure to wikis to enable rapid development of simple applications, while SocialText is trying to build the “easiest to use, simplest and quickest wiki.'’ Customers will decide for themselves which approach they like better, and I have no doubt both companies will be successful – wikis are a big enough idea to support more than one player.

This isn’t about a rich, mean company stomping all over a little guy. Somebody else has already said it: “It’s normal everyday business and social software companies are no less in this to win (and sometimes lose) customers.”

Here�s the bottom line � we�re competitive, we�re proud of our service and the team of people we�ve built and we�re excited about a budding customer list. However, we�re building a frugal, responsible culture, not one in which �boastful� people spend wildly while �luring� away the employees of a competitor pursuing a different strategy. That�s just not us.

PS: to answer the question in the preceding link of why we didn’t blog the news straight away – we didn’t mention it because Disney had asked us not to make a big deal about it. Hence our embarrassment at the leak.

Ouch. Our office got hit by lightning yesterday. Computers like lightning. Really.

The good folks at PC Magazine wrote a profile on JotSpot customer, Dickson Allan. DA uses a JotSpot wiki to keep 100 in-the-field consultants in sync. In addition, they’re starting to use some of the application functionality of JotSpot to build mini-apps that replace Excel spreadsheets they were emailing around (how’s that for multiple clauses?). For example, Dickson Allan built an “opportunity pipeline” application that replaced a spreadsheet that consultants were constantly emailing to one another. Now they’ve got a web-based application that’s easily customizable and works exactly as they want it to. All in about an hour.

I’m a big fan of sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, so it’s great to see that someone lumps us into their category as services that are “reshaping and redefining our view of the Web.”

Welcome to the JotSpot blog. We’ve been doing the blog thing for a while as individuals (see the links on the side for our personal blogs), but this will be a consolidated home for JotSpot-related news.