JotBlog

We’ve always had a hard time keeping secrets, and it’s been really tough to keep this one - Google has acquired JotSpot. Yep, that’s right - we’re all Googlers now, and we couldn’t be more excited.

But let’s talk about you, our users and customers. Even though we’re now part of Google, you’re still our first priority. That means you’ll continue to have uninterrupted access to your JotSpot products. Our first area of focus at Google is the transition to their storied systems and datacenters. In order to ensure that the transition goes smoothly and without inconvenience, we’ve closed off new customer registrations so we can take care of you. Our support team also continues to be available if you have problems or questions.

So why is this such a big deal? As you can imagine, being a small company brings challenges as well as advantages. At Google we’ll be able to plug into the resources that only a company of Google’s scale can offer, such as access to world-class datacenters, helping us to ensure better performance and scalability. And access to people - Google has thousands of the smartest engineers and product people for us to tap into. Google is a hotbed of innovation and creativity, and we’re thrilled to be a part of it.

We can’t share all of our plans with you just yet, but let’s just say the future looks bright, and we’re glad you’ll be a part of it. We want to offer our sincere thanks to all of you – our customers and users – for putting us on the path to success. Your suggestions, feedback, kudos, and (yes) complaints have made us what we are today. We can’t wait to continue the relationship at Google.

— The JotSpot Team

P.S. if you have questions about your account, please continue to direct them to support@jot.com.

Hi, my name is Mark Wubben and I’m a summer intern here at JotSpot. Since I came here last month I’ve been working on an internal project named “Jotliner", which has been released today as the To-Do List application! With the app, you can (of course) create your own to-do lists. The real power, though, is in the way you edit your to-do items. And I don’t mean that you can use the mouse to edit items or re-order them, I’m talking keyboard shortcuts. Tons of ‘em. Quickly move items around, select items, indent, outdent, highlight. Or delete, and then undo, followed by a quick redo. Edit, create new items. Cut or copy, and paste. Check them, and move the checked items to the bottom of the section (called “sifting"). And yes, sections, so you can group items together on one to-do list page. There even is a smart page-lock to prevent someone else from adding items to your list as you’re checking off your completed items. (Although you’ll have to be careful not to edit the same list on two different computers or browsers at the same time). And if you don’t like keyboard shortcuts, everything I just mentioned can be done using the mouse as well.

I could continue talking for a while longer, but you really should give it a try yourself. If you already have a JotSpot wiki version 2.7, which is also known as JotSpot 2.0 and was released July 24th, you can follow the link to “Install applications” down at the bottom of the page. (Make sure you have the permissions to install applications, otherwise it won’t work). This will take you to the Wiki Application Gallery. The To-Do List application is at the bottom of this page. Click “Try it now” to install. If you don’t have the 2.7 wiki, sign up first, and then install.

I would like to conclude this post by thanking David Schontzler, who undertook the original Jotliner project and came up with the interaction model. The app wouldn’t have been here today without his great work. And there’s the brilliant famfamfam.com icon set we’re using for the toolbar icons. As for me, I’m already working on a different project, which I hope to complete before I leave on September 1st. Stay tuned.

All JotSpot wikis are currently being upgraded from version 0.9.40 to version 0.9.45.2. The upgrades are scheduled to complete by Sunday 11/20/05. You can check your wiki’s version by clicking About JotSpot at the bottom of any page.

The new release is mainly a maintenance and developer feature release – there are no new major user-level features. Please see the release notes for full details.

Business Week’s Best of the Web survey just added an entirely new category this year called Do It Yourself – and JotSpot has been nominated.  If you enjoy using JotSpot, your vote of support would be greatly appreciated.

JotSpot is honored as one of InfoWorld’s Innovators of the Year for 2005!

Fellow JotSpotter Abe Fettig blogs about a new project in the works at Jot that we’re calling JotSpot Live. You may have caught an early glimpse of it if you saw the writeup of our first Hackathon, and it’s come a long way since then.

Needless to say, we’re all incredibly excited about it.

Last week we unveiled the new Jot Developer Connection site over at developer.jot.com. I posted an overview on the developer blog, but wanted to cross-post a slice here.

What’s the Jot Developer Connection?

We created the Jot Developer Connection (JDC) because… that’s what the big kids do. No seriously, we’ve got one basic goal with the Jot Developer Connection:

With that goal in mind, we’ve put a stake in the ground and kicked things off with some basics:

So the JDC is for existing users looking to customize their JotSpot. It’s also for folks new to Jot. Anyone interested in a better way to collaborate and share using the web. I think of developing with Jot as a “special orders don’t upset us” experience, and I personally hope to show you what I mean by this.

Yesterday was a relatively busy blogging day for JotSpot. In addition to Joe’s post about our inaugural hackathon, we started the JotSpot Developer Blog! The blog lives at http://developer.jot.com, and is actually a Jot app written by none other than our very own Reuben “Steel Trap” Antman.

One purpose of the Jot Dev blog is to create a place where internal Jot developers and guests can “tend fire” between hackathons. It’s sometimes frustrating to have access to new APIs and features weeks or even months before our customers. So we plan to share the latest pre-release JotSpot features and examples, both to inform but also to get early feedback. Another purpose of course is a place to riff on what interests us as individual developers. Yep, we’ve got opinions! But in the end, we hope that sharing our “inside” info and perspective helps folks succeed in developing apps, plugins, widgets, and themes with JotSpot.

BTW in addition to hosting the Jot Dev blog, developer.jot.com will soon host a new community site for developers only. More details on that later…

JotSpot is now free for open source projects! We’ve been wanting to offer this for a while now, but we’ve been waiting for guest user (i.e. anonymous) support, which just arrived with the latest update. Jot benefits greatly from open source software, and this is one way we can give back. And because a JotSpot wiki is provided as a hosted service, open source projects not only get the bits free, they get the server hosting and management free as well – the whole enchilada. (Note that we’re still in beta, but this offer is through GA and beyond… )

You can go here and get your site in a minute or two. Just be aware of the fine print:

1) Your project must be open source. 2) Your JotSpot wiki must be public, i.e. it must be configured to allow anonymous guest readers. (how to: more actions->global settings, then enable guests to ‘read pages’) 3) You gotta send an email (scott at jot.com) and let us know about 1) and 2) above so we don’t start asking you for money!

Besides being a hosted service, other cool features include look and feel customization through CSS and the ability to create Jot apps like forums, knowledge bases, project planners, blogs, etc. You can even use or build on apps from our gallery or Jot community site.

Give us a whirl if your project might benefit from an application wiki.