JotSpot, one of the very early Web 2.0 startups started by Excite founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, has been acquired by Google. JotSpot is a wiki hosting and collaboration tool that launched at the Web 2.0 conference way back in 2004.
According to the official announcement at JotSpot’s blog, the first move they’ll be making is moving to Google’s datacenters. New registrations are currently turned off as a result, but service to existing users has been made free. Also, what’s interesting is that no financial details of this acquisition were revealed.
As per Google’s past regime, it’s apparent that JotSpot will reopen as a free product, and add to their web office suite. What’s also apparent is that JotSpot — the product in its current state — will no longer exist. The pattern? Unless your YouTube or Picasa, you’re going to become a Google product, and with it, a part of history.
JotSpot seems like one of those tools which really had the wiki market figured out. Their business model, which was based on different account levels, seemed perfectly in sync with what they were trying to achieve. While wikis are mainly considered as free, open source, community built-upon and what not, they indeed were one of the first and only ones to put a business side to it.
In Google’s army of web office products, this is one that will seem strikingly different. JotSpot is also another example where the power and advantage of a web-based product has been put to good use. In the end, this is how I think web office will dominate traditional office: not by simply replacing and replicating, but by adding something that previously would not have been possible.
[tags]JotSpot, Google, Acquisitions, Web Office[/tags]
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