Googlified

Sixteen months of eager waiting, Google finally relaunched JotSpot today as Google Sites. The new service is part of Google Apps, but unlike other services included in Google Apps, Google Sites is not available as a separate application for non-Apps users (yet).

After a few minutes of playing with Google Sites, I found it quite promising (so far). The setup progress for a new site is very simple, just enter the site name, choose who can edit & view the site, and pick one of the 20 available themes. Of course, you will need to enable the service in Google Apps before this. Just go to the Dashboard, click on Add more services, and there you can enable it.

Editing pages for the sites is pretty straight forward, takes place in an advanced WYSIWYG editor. You can include various multimedia content in the sites’ pages, including Google Calendar, Picasa Web slideshows, Google/YouTube videos, and even iGoogle gadgets.

Each Google Sites account receives “10GB of storage in Google Sites” with “an additional 500MB for each user account” of the Premier and Education editions.

Nostalgia strikes! It reminds me the old days of creating websites on GeoCities. *Sigh*

Andrew Miller of Your Search Advisor recently attended a Google Apps presentation where Googler Scott Johnston (formerly works at JotSpot) revealed that Google Page Creator will be replaced by JotSpot applications, and rename to Google Sites.

Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

Scott also confirmed that Google will release offline versions of many Google’s services, including Google Docs, Gmail and Google Calendar, with the help of Google Gears.

I am just afraid that by “sometime in 2008″ they meant “the week before the end of 2008″. Remember the case with Google Presentation, do you? :)

[via TechCrunch]

The last post about JotSpot on this blog was more than three months ago (the funny thing is that the post titled: JotSpot Coming Soon), and we haven’t heard anything interesting from them until now: ZDNet blog Between the Lines reports that JotSpot joining Google Apps revolution.

Google is adding JotSpot, which the company acquired in October 2006, to the Google Apps, according to Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise.

That makes sense…

[via InsideGoogle]

Osilvan in the Google Blogoscoped forum found a Help Center and Support Group for JotSpot, a wiki service that Google acquired on October last year.

When one of the Group members ask when will Google relaunch the product, JotSpot Guide Jim, the official Google representative replies,

The Jotspot team is hard at work to migrate the product into Google’s infrastructure.  Our policy is not to share specific product roadmaps or dates, so we cannot provide any additional details.  That being said, we will let all of our users know when we re-launch our service.

Can’t wait! :)

JotSpot, the online application wiki company that Google acquired last October, will be upgrading all the hosted JotSpot wikis to version 2.9 within next week.

Version 2.9 was released on December 18, 2006 with “several exciting features including support for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2″, as well as some RSS feed issues for specific applications. You can read the released note here.

The JotSpot team is working hard “migrating to Google’s infrastructure”, and this version “will be the last JotSpot version produced before the migration occurs”.

Just in case they won’t open registration next week (mostly won’t), can someone send me an invitation for JotSpot? In the mean time, I will just play with the test wiki.

Well, I am NOT sure if Google really paid $100 million for JotSpot, but a photo in Dave McClure’s Flickr page says “joe(Kraus) sez: i’m holding out one finger for every $10M Google paid for Jot… but they’re in my pockets ;)“. If I am not wrong, people usually have 10 fingers(thumbs are fingers too, don’t get confused). Picture of Joe Kraus by Dave McClure, in the Web 2.0 Conference. By the way, this is today’s “Image of the Day”, but with a special title. :D

Description: Well, Google acquired JotSpot, and the JotSpot team will move to Googleplex in theory. Ning, Inc’s office is only a couple stairs above JotSpot’s office, Paul Lloyd, Ning’s lead designer, says, “Won’t be seeing this sign on my way down the office stairs for much longer…” You know, “Great people meet great people“. Photo by Paul Lloyd.

Amazing! Google announces that they have acquired JotSpot, the first application wiki company, founded Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer. On JotSpot’s site, it says that they sell the company is because “Google shares JotSpot’s vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online” and “will accelerate our team’s vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web”.

Google will be offering this service for free for current users (and future users), as usual. At the same time, Google closed off new account registrations, until they have migrated to Google’s servers.(Sounds familiar to you? Yeah, Writely!)

Current users will continue to have uninterrupted access, and will able to “export an XML version of all of your data, including version history, at any time”. Of course, your data will stay as secure as it was. If you need any support from the JotSpot team(the now Googlers), you can contact them at “support(at)jot.com“.

Will Google go wiki? They might. “We look forward to putting those wikis to work.”

UPDATE: Checkout how they celebrate their Google acquisition on Flickr.