The news this morning, posted at the Google Blog is that Google has acquired Jotspot.
I’ve been working with Jotspot wikis for a couple of internal business uses, and really enjoy it. This was an excellent choice for Google, and the program provides a nice additional tool to go along with Google’s Docs and spreadsheets. There is some overlap between what it offers, and what those programs provide, but the addition of the team behind JotSpot should work to make the programs even better.
Registration for the site is presently closed while it is moved over to Google’s achitecture, but it appears that once it is back running, Google will not charge people to use it.
There was a “Frequently Asked Questions” section on the jot.com web site which is not available anymore, involving the acquistion on the Jotspot pages, and I found a patent application that was filed by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer of Jotspot, Inc.
Collaborative web page authoring Invented by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer US Patent Application 20060235984 Published October 19, 2006 Filed on January 31, 2006
Abstract
Collaborative web pages are enabled which allow every page on a website to be editable by an author and by others the author lets access the site. Web pages can send and receive email messages. Users can attach files to pages. Structure queries and page-building are enabled by use of various forms and form elements.
Some of the features of the system described in the patent application:
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Editable Pages
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WYSIWYG Editing
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Email to a Page
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Attachments to pages
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Full text Indexing
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Revision Control
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Form based input of Data
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Dynamic Tables & Calendars
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Compositing Data (data from multiple sources may be placed upon a page, including the embedding of Google Search Results and custom news feeds
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System has a built in Application Platform
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Easily Customized and Modified Pages
The founders of Jotspot, Inc., Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, were founders of Excite.com.
Graham Spencer published at least a couple patents while working at Excite:
System and method for querying multiple, distributed databases by selective sharing of local relative significance information for terms related to the query Patent no. 5,826,261 Granted October 20, 1998
Information retrieval system and method with implementation extensible query architecture Patent no. 5,577,241 Granted November 19, 1996