Joe Kraus of JotSpot announced today that his company is the latest acquisition by Google.
I’m not a JotSpot user — in fact, I’m not certain I heard of them before today. But after checking their site out I’m not surprised they were snatched up by the big G. Look at this page, which contains a bunch of wiki applications that JotSpot offers. Compare with some of the web apps Google has come out with in the last couple of years. See anything familiar?
One thing Google didn’t have up until a month ago was a product that enabled users to create their own communities online. Now that they’ve acquired YouTube and a wiki application that supports forums they have all the tools to create the next MySpace if they wish: post your photos in Picasa Web Albums, videos on YouTube, chat in real-time with your friends in Google Talk (or a next-gen version of GTalkr in a web page), use Gmail for your e-mail needs, create a knowledgebase about your favorite topic using the JotSpot wiki and Google Base, provide a real-world context by linking things to Google Maps and access everything through your mobile device via dodgeball and some of the other technology Google acquired in 2005.
Geez, now all they need is to purchase some machine translation technology so these communities aren’t limited by language….whoops, looks like they’ve already got that covered.
So what the hell is Microsoft doing? By the looks of things, they’re stuck on the desktop.
Update: Scoble describes the wiki market as “white hot” and says the MS Office team should be asking themselves what Google is up to. I disagree, Robert…they should be asking their managers what Microsoft is going to be up to. Google’s plan is clear: to dominate the field of web-based applications so it’s no longer about where you are or what OS you’re using.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
November 1st, 2006 at 1:34 pm
ahhh.. what’s MS doing? Hmm.. contemplating buying Yahoo with cash no doubt. They got 35 billion in the bank and Yahoo is worth 36.. It seems to me that they can throw some money at this situation.
This may not be anything to do with Google’s Web 2.0 ventures but… You think something may be brewing in Redmond?
November 1st, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Well, that may be Microsoft’s best move in order to get a large, competing advertising network…but perhaps not much else. Yahoo owns Flickr, del.icio.us and GeoCities, which appear to be (IMO) its most widely-known offerings. Everything else appears to be an also-ran when compared to Google, Apple or Microsoft. Certainly an aquisition would be bad for consumers, since it I imagine it would result in the elimination of products that compete with Microsoft’s, such as Yahoo Messenger, the search engine itself, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) and anything music-related. On the plus side, the All-Seeing Eye would probably get better…