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More on Google/JotSpot

Ben, in the comments, wrote:

But they already have Google Notebook (http://www.google.com/notebook) which I always thought of as a WYSIWYG wiki.

JotSpot certainly fits in with their suite of web services though.

I think the last point is the key. I don’t think the Googleised version of JotSpot (Gspot?) will be intended as a service to the everyday web user in the way that, say, the toolbar, desktop search and notes are. Instead, it will be the glue that sticks all their ‘enterprise’ (by which I mean services a small to medium business could use) services together – Docs, Spreadsheet, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Blogger, Base, Page Creator.

What Google is currently lacking with all the services above is a common platform, or a base, from which they can all be launched. For instance, they really need to sort out a single Google ‘drive’ where all files, whether blogger posts, Gmail attachments, docs, spreadhseets, Picasa photos or whatever, are stored under a user name. JotSpot could act very well as a file manager for all of this as well as providing the collaborative space to link them all together with multiple users, with shared files across a certain group, for example.

So, you could have a small business with a number of home based employees, each with certain access to certain files, along with a wiki-based intranet (effectively) which would act as a communication tool as well as a base for project management and the like. All files could be accessible to all employees wherever they are based, wherever they log in.

And that would be pretty cool. Of course, companies like Zoho are already providing something very similar. But they don’t have the Google brand to break through in the way an integrated Google system could.

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Google buys JotSpot

JotSpot has been purchased by Google, according to the official Google blog:

OK, I can finally blurt it out: JotSpot is now part of Google, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Three years ago my friend Graham Spencer and I set out to start a new company. We’d both recently left Excite, which we co-founded, and we had spent a few years starting a nonprofit together. We brainstormed scores of ideas, debated late into the night and ultimately exchanged a mountain of email and documents. We realized we needed a tool to help us organize our thoughts or we’d quickly become overwhelmed. So Graham set up a wiki. I was hooked because it immediately changed the way we worked together. Everything was kept in one place, not locked in email threads or on different computers. We could both make changes to the same document, without having to know HTML (well, without me having to know HTML). After twenty minutes of using a wiki, I was convinced that they were like the Internet in 1993 — useful, but trapped in the land of the nerds (which both Graham and I proudly inhabit). So we set out to start JotSpot as a way to bring the power of wikis to a much broader audience.

As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other’s sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google’s scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people.

Google seem to be on something of a feeding frenzy at the moment. Still, a well deveoped wiki system will certainly fit in wth the collaborative online office they are building with Docs, Spreasheet and Calendar.

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Gmail Attachments and Google Docs

Interesting post on Google Operating System blog:

If Gmail were integrated with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, it would have a new link next to some attachments that says “Import in Google Docs & Spreadsheets”. This way, you could edit these files online.

Fortunately, if you go to this page, you can find a mail address where you can send your documents to be uploaded in Google Docs. So you can add that address as a contact (let’s say Google Docs), and forward the mails that have .doc or .xls attachments to that address.

You can even add a filter that sends all your .doc or .xls attachments to Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

Has the words: has:attachment doc OR xls
Forward it to: (the email address discussed above)

For the moment, you can upload only files smaller than 500 KB and you can’t upload spreadsheets by mail (but this feature will be added soon).

Source: Import Gmail Attachments into Google Docs

I’d rather there were some sort of Google file manager to managed all attachments and Docs files in the same place, but it’s a step forward anyway…

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D’oh!

The Google Toolbar for Firefox has a subscribe button for RSS feeds. You can choose your aggregator from a list. Google Reader isn’t on it…

Google Docs, and Zoho

What was Writely is now Google Docs. Sigh. They’ve combined it with the spreadsheet package, so they are available from the same screen – the homepage being effectively a file manager when you log in.

One criticism of Google when they buy things is that they don’t bother to integrate them properly with everything else – think Blogger, and until recently, Picasa. But with Writely, sorry, Google Docs, they have got rid of the nice Writely green and orange look and the end result is just really dull. I suppose it means that Gmail, Calendar and the two productivity apps all now share the same interface.

In other news on the online productivity front, the Zoho suite of online productivity apps now only needs on sign-in per application. Before, if I used Writer, and then needed to go into Sheet, I would have to log in twice. No more. Good stuff.

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