wetpaint: Wikis easily edited and designed
Ever since reading about wetpaint on their front page during beta, I’ve been waiting anxiously to see what their product looks like. Their philosophy stands on the foundation of collaborative thinking with an easy to use wiki interface. In addition, the site itself is very nicely designed, with smooth curves and wise use of space which is easy on the eye.
Right now, wetpaint can host your wiki for free. The target audience is a wide range of users, including club members, schools, bloggers, and hobbyists. They’ve really tried to make the service as friendly and as easy to use as possible–it’s very inviting even for wiki novices.
The interface for editing uses AJAX so that you can edit in place without refreshing (something I wish Wikipedia would implement). As soon as you hit the EasyEdit button, the page dims and focuses on the editing box, where you can edit in a WYSIWYG environment. A toolbar appears and allows you to do basic formatting and insert links. Another feature is the ability to place tags on each page, which greatly helps searches. Once you’re done editing, just hit the save button, and in an instant you’ll see the changes. It really is slick.
You also have total control concerning the editing rights of visitors, from allowing anonymous users to edit, or only allowing your close contacts to edit. It’s flexible enough to meet any need.
Right now, I see about 100 wikis that are hosted by wetpaint, and they’re really trying to grow more. Since they are currently a free service, wetpaint gets revenue by placing contextual ads on each wiki page. The front page displays some the featured wikis that their users have grown.
What I would like to see is a premium wiki service which gives users more enhanced hosted features like:
- Ability to edit CSS: Currently, users can only choose from a library of templates.
- Guaranteed unlimited space: wetpaint currently provides unlimited space, but they may restrict this in the future.
- Media hosting (audio, video, etc).
As evident by the FAQ, wetpaint is still trying to figure out what users really want, and many of these features may become live if there is a high demand for them.
Overall, wetpaint looks like a real winner. The wikis that are made all look nice, and most importantly, are very easily edited. They’ve really flattened the learning curve for wikis, and their audience is potentially very large. Make sure to check out wetpaint if you’re looking for a good hosted wiki service.
