I recently took some time to try out Stikipad, a new Web 2.0 application which brings personal wikis to a new level. It’s slick, easy to use and shares an intuitive interface. Apart from its very ‘greedy’ business model, I think it’s a great product which may go further — like its sort-of competitor Basecamp.
Why I like Stikipad is because it nails the qualities of a good web application. To try it out, I registered an account, created a wiki and added content — all pretty seemlessly. That’s how a typical web app should be. They’ve done a great job in making sure their users, even to an extent the technically challenged, know what to do next and know how to do it. The problem with some web apps comes down to simply this, confused users. On the feature side of things, they’ve got everything.
The business model, however, I found is a bit too greedy for me. Currently, Stikipad is reaches out to people looking to collaborate and plan. BaseCamp already does a great job in this and if someone asked me if I could pay for only one of the services which one I would — it would be BaseCamp. This is where I expect a service like Stikipad to be free, yet make money in a different way (monetizing et al), and become [overtime] better than BaseCamp, in which case I would cancel my BaseCamp subscription right away. With this kind of a thing, it would have more market share, be more succesful in general, and make the same amount of money as they would with an alternative business model with less users.
Stikipad, on the other side of the things, pretty much nails it. I expect the personal wikis space to grow much more in the future, so Stikipad may have more competition, but they will stackup.
