Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Google Acquires Jotspot

UPDATE: We are offering to help Jotspot customers get out of a spot.

My most sincere congratulations to Joe, Graham, Ken and the Jotspot team with their acquisition by Google.  It has been great competing with you.

This is another great validation of the category we helped start. While Jot took their product in a different direction, focusing on SMBs, being a proprietary development platform and developing other apps, we chose to focus specifically on being the open, best-of-breed wiki. With a different path, Jot too has made good contributions for awareness of the wiki way.

Despite their official FAQ, Socialtext has recently reaped the benefits of the discontinuation of their Enterprise product, JotBox, with customer migrations to the Socialtext Appliance.  Today Socialtext is the only proven wiki Appliance solution available in the market.  Since Socialtext 2.0, I can decidedly say we have the simplest and easiest to use wiki in the market, whether Appliance, Hosted or Open Source.

This acquisition will further commoditize the low end of the market.  Something we have  encouraged with our Open Source versions of both Socialtext and SocialCalc.

Again, congrats, it is a real treat.   

Le Web 3

Saturday I bummed around Palo Alto with Loic Le Meur.  A good friend and angel investor in Socialtext, we talked tech and politics over sushi and Peet's coffee.  He made a videoblog with his mobile phone, revealing my outer dork.

Loic is getting ready to host LeWeb3 in Paris on December 11th and 12th.  Since the first Les Blogs, it has grown into perhaps the leading social software event in Europe.  Loic expects 1,000 bloggers from 25 countries and has made it affordable. 

I'm planning on presenting this year. If you want to provide feedback on the agenda or suggest your startup for a speaking slot, the event wiki is here.

November Wiki Wednesday

Come on by Wiki Wednesday this week for a conversation about Socialtext 2.0 design and SocialPoint with Kirsten Jones and whole team.  The discussion will be both technical, and not, and pizza.

SocialPoint: Best-of-Breed Wiki on Sharepoint

This morning we released SocialPoint, or Socialtext running on SharePoint.  At first, this may seem counter-intuitive for a company like Socialtext.  SharePoint is coming out with wikis and blogs in their 2007 version, why embrace and extend?  Let me give you my personal reasons.

First of all, the humanizing of Microsoft has changed my attitude about the convicted monopolist.  I believe that great people can work to change organizations, not just from Ray Ozzie on down.  I'd rather be part of communities of change. I'll still be a stalwart critic of the organization, but know I will have constructive conversations as a result.

Second, I believe that our Open Source solutions cooperating with Microsoft may grow the Open Source community as a whole.  Most people won't see this in Microsoft's best interest.  I do.  Some people won't see this in Open Source's best interest.  I do.

Third, SharePoint 2007 is an incumbent entry into the market that validates and grows the category.  There is an increasing role for the best-of-breed wiki in the long term.  Markets reward choice.

Fourth, the short-term role for a best-of-breed wiki the works with Sharepoint is immediately apparent.  Here's what Larry Cannell, who runs collaboration at Ford Motor Company, had to say about the next version of SharePoint:

However, this highlights a potential risk of leveraging SharePoint for use cases like blogs and wikis. While SharePoint can provide scalable services that standard blog engines may struggle to support, there could be other tactical issues (in addition to the lack of support for wiki links) that are exposed and can not be resolved until a capability is built into the platform (which could be a long time given release cycles).

These nagging questions, along with the broadly assumed definition of "enterprise" to mean an intranet running all Microsoft products, left me unsure whether Microsoft will become an enterprise Web 2.0 company any time soon. While I believe a platform like SharePoint 2007 could easily position Microsoft to deliver enterprise-grade Web 2.0 services, I think this may be difficult for them as long as the Office and SharePoint teams appear to be so inwardly focused.

Fifth, there is the profit motive, balanced by freedom.  This will sell more seats of both Socialtext and SharePoint.  More users and users as developers can choose, even in an IT environment.

This wasn't the easiest decision, but whenever faced with a difficult one, just listen to your customers.  Here's what the first SocialPoint customer had to say:

"We are also very excited about the possibility of integrating Socialtext with our growing Microsoft SharePoint installation. Combining the structure of SharePoint with the open, flexible features of Socialtext's wiki is a great solution for supporting teamwork."

Right now, I'm intently listening to our community.  The decision is if we should undertake another first with uncertain benefits, if we should release the first SharePoint Web Parts under an Open Source License.

21st Century English Restoration

"who had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presum'd they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people, did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave a set of actors whom the public were inclined to support." -- war of the theaters

My aunt was an English teacher, and she bemoaned how email killed the use of the English language.  I still can't disagree with her entirely.  However, an English Restoration may be partially upon us. 

Not in a literal sense, but Firefox 2.0 includes spell check.  When IE7 catches up to support the first wide-scale writing interface since email, and for the Mac, the spelling part of restoring English may catch up.  IE7 definitely gets the read part of the web, and through mandated security update (a very deep oxymoron, considering monopoly monoculture) a good part of the world will be Fed.

Long live the king.

Scoble Diggs Up Cost Per Influence

Robert Scoble asks:

How could we measure audience engagement?

What he is after isn't engagement, but influence.  Here's the answer I've been trying to encourage others to implement:

• Metric: Cost Per Influence
• Format: Sell Side Advertising

In other words, we've had this conversation.

Abundance, and Five Years of Blogging

When I sat down in my first economics class at UCLA, the professor wrote on the blackboard all we would learn, in really big letters:

SCARCITY

I've been blogging for five years as of this month, and here's what I've learned:

ABUNDANCE

I have discovered I have a lot to give.  And when I give, I notice others give more.  Some of them I've formed relationships with, and trust opens giving, but I have also learned to trust strangers to share in abundance.  Life is iterative, markets are not transactions and scarcity of attention is false. Our learnings compound abundance and there may be no limit to what we can produce.

David Hornik strikes again with Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance:

The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance -- don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

I trace a lot of my thinking about abundance to Jerry Michalski's, here's a small chunk of it:

It drives me nuts that scarcity is seen as such a fundamental requirement for creating a business. Sure, there are plenty of businesses built around scarce resources, and sure, Dave's time and my time are scarce, but that's no proof that businesses can't cruise along profitably creating voluntary loyalty by knowing their customers better, never betraying them, always being available and fixing problems, responding more quickly than others.... you get the picture. But go to business school and what they teach you is how to create artificial scarcity. That's the kind of thinking that got us into the present mess.

Digging deeper, Howard Reingold is fostering a discipline of cooperation studies. You can also find this wiki page, with a link to a 1994 essay by Flemming Funch who I used to blog alongside a lot in the early days.

I suppose that abundance economics would include giving one's ideas and actions freely, because one feels like it, because one sees the need for it, and because one understands that when you contribute to the whole, we all benefit.

The Internet is a good example of some of the principles of giving freely and of abundance. So many resources here are given freely, without expecting anything directly in return. So many people are willing to help each other, even though they don't really have to and they don't get "paid" for it.

I think there are many times more power in actions that are done freely, because one sees a need for improvement, than in actions that are done reluctantly, because one is forced by lack.

I believe that abundance thinking, and actions, trumps the minds and greed of the scarce.  That the one overarching pattern in the present wave of innovation is share control to create value.  That what powers it isn't Moore's Law processessing infinite supply or Metcalfe's networking choice and collective wisdom.  It is the capacity of people to produce when old frameworks don't in the way of each other.

So much of this is about how we envision the future.  Not in the grand sense that the rules are changing.  But when two or more people can believe in an opportunity, they can share cost and risk to get there together, in the process reduce them -- and learn so they and others can build upon it.

Low Threshold Sharing Practice

Catherine Shinners shares some hallway conversations from Office 2.0.  One thing stood out for me as a simple practice to get people to share their ideas from Toby Moore.  With the workplace, and school for that matter, we are taught to hold on to our ideas.  Generation M, however, gets their homework done on MySpace, what some consider cheating, but when they enter the corporate world -- it is collaboration.

The other practice is the "3,4,5" notion.   Most people focus on their top two ideas as try to refine them as their best ideas.   At the IOCT, people  are encouraged to disseminate their third, fourth and fifth ideas, things that they, themselves, might deem "lower tier,"   or "half formed," but by putting it out to the larger IOCT community, someone might be able to help advance the idea, to see where the idea might flourish in a broader context.

In this way, as Toby says, it's open source ideas, and while the technical open source community's mantra is with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, In the realm of innovation and ideas, I pointed out that it's more like, with enough eyeballs, more ideas have legs, and are possibly richer in their potential.

Another way to approach this is encourage people to share ideas for project that are context, not core, to them at least.  Of course, you have to make those projects transparent and grant permission to participate.

Itty Bitty Miki Wiki

Bitty is the little browser that goes on any Web page, it's like Picture-in-Picture for the Web. Miki is the little browser wiki interface of Socialtext, usually for mobile devices. Put them together and you get a cool wiki widget for your blog, personal homepage, wiki page or website. You can use the Socialtext Bitty Browser Widget creator on any public Socialtext wiki. Here is a result, using the Open Source Wiki:

Wiki-powered Sales Teams

Kris Duggan recently joined Socialtext and shares some best practices for using wikis for managing sales.  The primary benefits he sees:

• Group Memory
• Team selling and leveraging your resources (The number one rule in sales!)
• Transparency

The biggest benefit to me is how more informal conversations are captured through CCing the wiki or taking open call logs.  I'm interested to hear the experience of other sales teams.