Printer Friendly Version

Enterprise wiki vendor SocialText is opening up the code to its applications in a move that will help promote the wiki platform and aid SocialText in the development of its products.

Approximately 20 percent of SocialText's code is open source licensed today, co-founder and CEO Ross Mayfield told Intranet Journal, but he hopes that number is up to 80 percent by the first quarter of 2006. SocialText develops its wiki products on top of the Kwiki open-source wiki project.

The first fruit of the open-source move is SocialText's Wikiwyg tool, which allows WYSIWYG editing for wiki pages. SocialText originally developed Wikiwyg for an implementation at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a London-based investment bank. Dresdner wanted to use a wiki for enterprise collaboration and to essentially replace the intranet, but it didn't want to teach end users how to code for a wiki. Since being released to the public, a number of enhancements have been developed for the tool, including the ability to use it in Internet Explorer.

"It blurs the distinction between the readable and writable Web," Mayfield said of Wikiwyg, and that is, essentially, what wikis are all about. The concept is now 10 years old, and was an open-source tool from day one. There remain about 150 open-source wikis out there, and one can be written using as little as five lines of code.

But it's Mayfield's SocialText that leads the market for enterprise wikis, and the more widespread the adoption of wikis becomes, the more SocialText stands to gain. By opening up development of wiki products, the more people will become familiar with the tools.

Wikiwyg allows Web users to edit content in a wiki by double-clicking on the page to open a WYSIWYG editor. The images show a Web page before (left) and after double-clicking.

"The most important thing is furthering the way wikis work," Mayfield said. But the motivation isn't purely for the good of the wiki. Once SocialText opens up its code, it will be easier for potential customers to try out wiki products and see if they want to upgrade from a free version like Kwiki to SocialText's hosted or appliance-based products.

Opening code also means customers can leave SocialText without significant risk because of the open platform. They can migrate to an open-source version when they end the relationship. Mayfield points to competitor JotSpot, which he says uses a wiki as a development platform. Any application built on JotSpot's proprietary platform can't easily be moved if a customer stops doing business with JotSpot, Mayfield said. (Both SocialText and JotSpot allow you to take your data with you when you stop using their tools.)

The commerical open-source business model also allows Mayfield to provide a better roadmap for the future of SocialText products, though he admits the wiki game is in the third inning. Wikiwyg is the first of many components that will focus on the presentation layer and work backwards, Mayfield said. Also in the pipeline is a tool called SynchroEdit, a real-time, collaborative editor. SocialText also plans to leverage the Atom API so it communicates not only with blogs, but with wikis as well.

The larger development community that SocialText gains from opening up its code will help it develop more products, and do it faster and without adding to its payroll. The company is already a model of efficiency built, quite literally, on wikis. The four co-founders were from four different cities when they started SocialText in 2002, and the company now has 15 people in 13 cities around the world.

SocialText is also turning to the Web's most famous wiki community for guidance by adding Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, to its board of advisors. Mayfield hopes to learn a lot about the community that developed around Wikipedia and gain some insight into the power of mass collaboration from Wales' presence. "The real amazing thing [about Wikipedia] is the process at work beyond the scenes," he said.

The hope is that SocialText can develop a similar community to develop new tools to spread the wiki word. "If we can let go of a little bit of control, it's going to result in a larger community," Mayfield said.