Saturday, September 24, 2005 [ 7:18 PM ] ;
0 replies"What's a wiki?"
Ask that question to the 95% of the population that doesn't code for a living, or write seriously, and they'll say it right back to you: "I don't know, what is it?"
"What's a document?" "What's word processing?" "What's a web page?"
Ask almost anyone those questions, and you'll probably get the right answer.
People ask me from time to time, "Isn't this just a wiki?". They're almost always either investor valley types, or bloggers, or programmers. My answer is, well, yes and no. It is, technically, a wiki - a collection of pages that you can easily link together. But then, Napster was technically just an FTP client and a vertical search engine, right? No big deal.
Well, no. It is a very big deal if you do something that lots of people want (online, shared, safe documents) in a way that's easy enough to deal with so that they can really do it. That's a big part of what we think we are - the easy way for folks to collaborate, publish, keep notes, make web pages, push to their blog, etc. Eventually, we hope to be even more useful than just plain pages, but that can wait. For now, we're just focusing on solving this problem really well.
The other question I get asked a lot is related - "So, how much of Word are you planning to copy?" The answer is: "none of it". We don't think of ourselves as a copy of Word on the web. We think that's what's known as a "dancing bear" - interesting and novel, but only because it's so weird, not because it's really useful.
What we are planning to do is to listen, very closely, to our users, and to iterate and improve the application as often as we can (currently every week or so), so that it's constantly getting better. Nothing makes me happier than all the great, positive feedback we've been getting, except maybe the negative feedback we sometimes get that helps us improve.
We're a word processor, re-invented for the web. We're going to be the best, most useful tool we can be in this context. We hope to keep you delighted for a long time.
I'll post on some upcoming features and ideas soon.
http://www.writely.com/
