JotSpot’s idea of roll your own applications through structred wiki use sounds brilliant to me, and the pharse “browse our application gallery” makes me all goose bumpy. Haven’t played with it yet, so obviously going to reserve judgement until then. However they get high marks in my book for being a company who blogs. I don’t think I can take a web company who isn’t blogging seriously.

update: Some notes on watching Jon Udell’s recording of a Jot demo.

  • Looks like it would have been a good year to make it to Web 2.0, the bankers and MBAs are finally gone again, and we can get back to building interesting tools. (but cut it out w/ the damn lazlo applets, when I want to slow my browser to a crawl, I’ll go find an animation of Duke doing somersaults)
  • Too small to see real details :(
  • something we call “forms” with “fields” :)
  • on wifimug I’ve been playing a little bit with similar ideas, but stopping short of creating a form concept instead relying on guessable/mungeable key-value pair mappings.
  • openguides would benefit from inline structure creation like this. Is SocialText thinking about this at all? And if so could we get that contributed back to Kwiki?
  • prevayler? (saw an exception, couldn’t tell what language.)
  • Twiki, Moin Moin, PHPWiki? I don’t think so. Wonder what thats about?
  • external datasources: rss digester (of course) but also xslt driven digester (not web services?). the salesforce demo is pretty compelling, the 2-way sync can’t be done w/ an XSLT digester, something else at work there.
  • “intelligently federated data” – sweet phrase and a hard problem
  • has a “lotus notes like flavor”, was thinking that myself. Enabling development by people “close to the data”.
  • interesting to see other folks grappling with the “its an ASP, but there is custom development” issue.
  • they missed (or avoided) jon’s question about once an org has allowed a 1000 custom apps to bloom through out their workflow/infrastructure how to cope/version/structure/remember. (aka “the lotus notes problem”) I see a bad case of “snowflakes” incoming. Similar but perhaps even worse then the problem you see currently in desktop “database development”.
  • this is situated software.

  • I think this is one of the tensions we’re struggling with right now in web development, doing more with less, and making space for emergent properties. Its not the route I’m going right now in the apps I’m building, and it certainly isn’t what anyone is asking for, but I can’t help but wonder if its a missed opportunity.

    No reason “loosely joined” has to apply only to your relationships external to your org. Drastically simpler interfaces and lower activation costs is a tradeoff with big ball of string, and tyranny of structurelessness.

  • how does it handle new records? 10,000 records? 100,000 records?
  • the game right now is simple tools, “collaboration primitives” with low skill theshold but powerful enough to get unexpected behaviours.