Two great free hosted wiki services
Stumble It!Schtuff and Writeboard provide good wiki functionality for free
The wiki market is maturing nicely with the arrival of some excellent hosted wiki services which are totally free within average levels of usage. Two of these free wikis which caught my attention are Schtuff from JanRain Inc and Writeboard from 37 signals.
Schtuff
schtuff is is a classic wiki which allows you to create a number of independent hosted spaces within it. You can invite any number of other users into each space with permissions ranging from admin to read only.
Each wiki page maintains a full history of versions with ability to revert to a previous version and to compare two versions. You can subscribe to spaces or even documents within spaces and you are notified by email and/or RSS if they are changed.
You get 3 spaces and 200MB for free and the developers say that they partly cover their costs via google ads within each space and will soon offer a paid subscription for users who need additional spaces or disk (prices not yet available).
There are some minor useability issues, such as the current inability to re-invite users or add attachments in a single operation, which reflect the newness of the product but given its functionality Schtuff is a very good choice if you are looking for a comprehensive but free wiki.
Writeboard
Another nice free wiki is Writeboard from 37signals who also do the basecamp web-based project management tool.
Writeboard allows you to create any number of writeboards (i.e shared pages) and invite users to share them.
It lacks some of the functionality of Schtuff in terms of tags and indexing but I prefer the way it manages and shows the differences between two versions of a page.
Whiteboard can also be integrated with the 37signals backpackit product (see my earlier review under The virtual road warrior software checklist).
The Writeboard user interface is clean and intuitive and provides a very nice solution for ad-hoc document collaboration between two or more people.
Tags: wikis
Digg | 
del.icio.us | 
Reddit | 
Yahoo! | 
Add to my favourites
Comments
I'm currenly reviewing hosted Wiki services to use on a customer project. I am a customer of 37 Signals and have used their BackPack and Basecamp applications extensively. I guess I never considered the Writeboard feature to be a Wiki since it's lacking so many of the Wiki-ish features, such as the customizable menus and WikiWord links. Used in combination with BackPack or Basecamp, they get better, but are still lacking when compared against TiddlyWiki, for example.
I gave Schtuff a quick try-out and my biggest problem with them is the inability to change the template. It's just plain ugly!
Maybe I've set my standards too high since I've immersed myself in customized TiddlyWikis for the past few weeks. Maybe Wikis are just boring and dull and that's all there is to it?
I'm going to keep searching until I find the best of both worlds.
Posted by: craig iskowitz | September 21, 2006 8:29 PM
There are a lot of other Wiki solutions. In fact most of them emerged last year.
My favorite ones are:
Wikidot.com - http://www.wikidot.com - hosted free wikis that come with a lot of features for an advanced user but not that easy
WetPaint - http://www.wetpaint.com - cute and well designed but this limits you somehow.
PBWiki - http://pbwiki.com - check out their recent WYSIWYG editor
regards - Daniel
Posted by: Daniel Zoo | February 20, 2007 12:58 PM
Daniel
Many Thanks for this valuable update to what seems to be one of the most popular posts on the site.
Please feel free to keep us posted on your investigations
Ken
Posted by: Ken Thompson | February 21, 2007 9:23 AM
Another really good free wiki service which even supports many languages around the world:
Wiki-site.com - http://www.wiki-site.com - allows to open and manage
a free wiki site with the same site engine of Wikipedia (Mediawiki)
Posted by: Omer Zil | October 17, 2007 2:29 PM
Bioteams Books Reviews
Could cell phones destroy civilisation
"Cell", the new novel by horror writer Stephen King, paints an all too plausible scenario where our addiction to cell phones enables a malicious virus to be pulsed to every phone in the world turning all who take the call into a flock of murderously mad zombies.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Related Online Collaboration Tools Articles
Microsoft Office: What's On Tap
Microsoft's new version of MS-Office promises contextual collaboration and presence awareness
Revolt against interactive voice response systems
We really value your call, so much so that we are answering it by computer!
If bioteaming is about making organisations and teams more alive then the current generation of Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRs) must be the complete antithesis of bioteaming.
Collaboration Software: Best Directories
With such an ever-growing list of collaboration platforms and applications of all shapes and sizes I thought it would be useful to gather together five of my favourite Collaboration Software Directories in one place.
