Search marketer Andrew Miller reports that Google may be about to launch a wiki-style collaboration platform. Google acquired popular wiki platform Jotspot earlier this year, fuelling speculation that a wiki was on the way. Andrew attended a presentation given by Scott Johnston, the former VP of Product Development at JotSpot and new Googler (Noogler). This is the gist on what he had to say, courtesy of Andrew:
- 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. [UPDATE] I don’t recall wikis being mentioned specifically but I assume they are part of the plan.
- Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.
- What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.
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