The nasty four-letter word that must be banished from the web
In a BusinessWeek article on the Google Sites launch, Dave Girouard, manager of the division that oversees Sites says:
“We are literally adding an edit button to the Web.”
But no mention of the word wiki, the very idea that has powered the rise of that “edit button.” In his writeup of the launch, Om Malik says:
“I bet like me, no one wants to deal with another wiki.”
No one? Really?
Fortunately, The CNET & ZDNet guys take a much more levelheaded approach, and point out Google’s haste to banish “wiki” from the web:
Larry Dignan says:
Frankly, none of this rebranding works all that well. It’s still not clear what Google Sites is about judging from its name. Google is trying to mainstream the use of the wiki but without the name. But Google Sites doesn’t exactly bonk you over the head with meaning either.
Overall, Google Sites is a collaboration app for people that are managing projects or classroom activities. In other words, it’s wiki-ish.
As for the branding–Jotspot to it’s-not-a-wiki to Google Sites–Google didn’t exactly clarify much of anything.
Rafe Needleman says:
Call it what you will (it’s a wiki, ok?)
Dan Farber says:
The term “wiki” has been banished from Googlespeak as the company tries to mainstream its collaborative applications. “There shouldn’t be a distinction between wikis and sites,” said product manager Scott Johnston. He hopes that the “edit button” becomes pervasive as the collaborative Web takes hold.
Johnson’s answer is interesting from a long-term perspective, but I don’t think banishing a term that many people in the mainstream are just beginning to understand, and value, is the clearest approach. Google should look to Apple, which does a much better job of easing major cultural change into the mainstream.
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Xavier says:
Feb 28th, 2008
I’m not sure I fully agree with you.
The term ‘wiki’ scares a whole lot of people who are not really into this whole web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 stuff …
Also that term generally brings the word ‘wikipedia’ in their mind, and the use of the wiki technology can bring something completely different,which confuses those people even more …
I’m starting to lobby inside our organization to implement blogs and collaborative online spaces (yes, wikis! ;o)),and I can tell you that its easier to tell people about a document that different people can contribute to, rather than using the word wiki …
Guy says:
Feb 28th, 2008
From what I see of their marketing materials so far, they are promoting Google Sites as a replacement for online website authoring tools. The various examples they give are all basically the same thing – pages with various, presumably templated, containers. I’ve not been able to get in and test because it will likely munge my other google services associated with my email address (quite annoying) but I can see where they are coming from – they see the underlying wiki technology as a great way to make common website scenarios easily editable online.
John Westra says:
Feb 29th, 2008
New Google Sites Application Misses Mark
After waiting expectantly for the release of Google Sites, the success to Jotspot, for more than a year, I must confess I’m pretty disappointed in the result. The user interface is clunky and non-intuitive and offers little new in the way of collaborative tools, other than Joomla-esq shared web page editing.
What happened? Google already has a terrific widget enabled web page creation tool. It’s called Blogger! Why didn’t they use that technology to make dropping various functional elements onto a page easy?
The ability to quickly create an Intranet/Xtranet of four to twenty pages is what most of my SMB clients are looking for. Doing this with SharePoint has always been too developer and infrastructure intensive, leaving us to recommend products like WebOffice (formerly Intranets.com) and Blue Tie as web-based collaboration tools.
BlueTie in unique in that it offers unique ways for partners to monetize the solution and generate a unique ongoing revenue stream. In fact, BlueTie was recently recognized as an OnMedia Top 100 Winner.
Google has missed the mark badly with its Google Sites application. It’s unfortunate, because it takes the pressure off Microsoft to improve SharePoint’s ease of use and Cisco to lower the cost of WebOffice.
Until Google releases a Google Sites application that is significantly easier to use and functional, I will continue to recommend WebOffice, Blue Tie or our own TeamPro application as a Intranet/Xtranet solution.