This is a crosspost from my OpenGarden blog

Note: I'm dead exhausted, so forgive me for any errors in this post. I've been traveling all weekend, and just got into Vegas this morning for the Community 2.0 conference.

MindTouch has just launched wik.is, whose predecessor you may be vaguely familiar with if you follow Web 2.0 news. You can create your own personal wiki once again! Yay!!!

When I joined MindTouch two years ago, I was excited to start working for a company that would be working on an enterprise wiki ... but my heart's always been with projects for the common Joe. My side project for three years (since college) has been developing a blogging/image sharing platform, so I've always had a user-centric view of the product.

I'm *ecstatic* that MindTouch is starting to extend DekiWiki for this purpose, and given the future plans for MindTouch in the enterprise market, I think there's a huge overlap which will benefit you guys quite a bit!

Rather than extol the virtues of wik.is, I'll focus on things that wik.is lacks: (can you tell I'm an engineer and not a marketer?!)

  • Editor woes! It's a step above TEXTAREA, but it's still FAR away from the ideal editor experience. I can' t tell you how often Steve, Aaron and I have sat around fighting with the editor. Since getting more developers on board, we've made fixing the editor a top priority for Itasca (possibly Hayes).
  • No export! AHHHH! DATA LOCK-IN SUCKS! TOTALLY true! We didn't leave this feature out on purpose to keep you guys on wik.is - we just didn't have time to completely engineer a solution that works well enough to offer it to you guys. Rest assured, if you want to move your data off of wik.is, we will work with you. I'd suggest posting in the forums; we can provide you with a database snapshot and a tar of your attachments.
  • Lack of skinnability. I think the most important feature on any site is the ability to project your style and themes onto a site. This is 50% why MySpace is so friggin popular (and 100% why I curse when a MySpace hottie's page freezes my computer... yet I keep going back ... JK!). For now, we threw up a proof-of-concept feature for Pro accounts that allows you to set a header via iframe ... but what I'd like to do (for a future release, and I'm just thinking out loud here) is allow for full CSS override access, allow and HTML footer/header inserts. But we'll see :)

Anyways, I'm wiped. I'm very proud of wik.is, and I hope you guys enjoy using it :)

Posted by roy on March 13, 2007 at 12:03 AM in MindTouch | 3 Comments

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Comment posted on March 15th, 2007 at 05:45 AM
good thing you can't register to use teh bloody site =)
Comment posted on March 15th, 2007 at 10:18 AM
how so?
Comment posted on March 16th, 2007 at 08:07 AM
i tried to register a wiki =). it said my site namewas already chosen. tried another... it was chosen. anyway.. i highly doubt "kjdfwoisnsbktongaaaba" was chosen. =)