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June 18 2006

Michael Arrington

Seattle based Wetpaint has been in private beta since March. On Sunday night they launched,,.,....

to the world, allowing anyone to create a free wiki on any topic. A good example wiki is this one around the XBOX 360.
Like pbwiki, Wikia and JotSpot, Wetpaint is a hosted wiki solution with wysiwyg editing (no need to use wiki code or html).
Each wiki (and each page on a wiki) is taggable, and Wetpaint includes higher end wiki functions like page lockdown, privacy, etc.

I created a wiki in about a minute and like the choice of templates. Wetpaint isn’t a fully customizable wiki, and you can’t run it on your own servers, but it is the best hosted wiki I’ve seen so far.
Wetpaint is free, although all pages have contextual advertising included on them. This is a big turnoff since most content developers would prefer to have ad revenue. A lot of venture money is flowing into wiki products.
Wetpaint raised just over $5 million in October 2005 from Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures.
The competition is well funded, too. JotSpot raised $5.2 million from Mayfield and Redpoint Ventures.
Wikia has $4 million from Bessemer and Omidyar Network. And while pbwiki hasn’t raised outside financing,
it does have a distribution deal with Yahoo that drives significant new users to the site. Wetpaint is a little different than each of these.
They are targeting the mass-edited wiki pages like Wikia, as well as smaller private and group wikis (think company project sites, intranets, social club sites, etc.).
The service is incredibly easy to use (Jotspot comes close, but isn’t as mass-user friendly) - and it may bring a much larger audience to wikis than are currently comfortable using them.

Wetpaint

1. June 19th, 2006 at 5:50 am
2. �blog: utilidades y recursos para blogs :: Wetpaint: Servicio gratuito para crear wikis excelente
   June 19th, 2006 at 7:12 am
3. xavodim.com
   June 19th, 2006 at 9:27 am
4. Wikis for everybody
   June 19th, 2006 at 9:40 am
5. Greg Hartnett’s Linkblog » Blog Archive » Wetpaint Launches: Wikis Evolve
   June 19th, 2006 at 10:50 am
6. Greg Hartnett’s Linkblog » Blog Archive »
   June 19th, 2006 at 10:52 am
7. Web 2.0 - Что нового? Новости интернет проектов » Wetpaint запущен: Wiki наступают
   June 19th, 2006 at 11:49 am
8. bMarc.net
   June 19th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
9. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Wetpaint開始： Wikiの進化
   June 19th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
10. "Etwas Anders" | Comments and Reflections
    June 20th, 2006 at 12:29 am

Comments

1. Simran
   June 19th, 2006 at 12:05 am I tried editing the TechCrunch wiki, but couldn’t. Precious, my Precious. The site doesn’t support Apple’s Safari. Really sad, considering some really creative, yet not-so-tech-savvy people use Macs. I like the product though. It needs some polishing up, but it has potential for sure. I bookmarked this post on digg: http://digg.com/technology/Wetpaint_Launches:_Wikis_Evolve
2. Sam Davyson
   June 19th, 2006 at 1:09 am No support for Opera? No thanks then.
3. RYK
   June 19th, 2006 at 1:27 am why do they need so much funding…the site appears to be simple piece of software and the hosting can’t possibly be too much. Is the rest for marketing?
4. Hope Leman
   June 19th, 2006 at 2:21 am Didn’t see any quick (or any?) way to set up RSS feeds of changes to the wikis. Gotta have RSS feeds of comments. It boggles the mind that so many people are creating interesting tools but not including RSS feeds to changes. Many of us try out many tools a day and we don’t have time to go back and check sites for changes. Let’s get on the RSS clue train, guys.
5. Craig McGinty
   June 19th, 2006 at 3:08 am Must agree with Hope, RSS has to be a feature otherwise I’ve not got the time to keep dropping in. The same could be said for much forum software as well.
6. Ruminator
   June 19th, 2006 at 3:28 am Actually, RSS feeds are on the Recently Updated Pages section and on the Recent Comments page. From my contact with them, they are working on Safari and Opera support (it works great with Firefox). They are also working on a WYSIWYG for tables as well (that’s one thing that my wiki contributors have been asking for).
7. cram
   June 19th, 2006 at 3:42 am Hi Mike Thumbs down for Wetpaint. I just created a wiki. My biggest complaint is that the pages are too cluttered. Creating pages is also not the easiest of tasks. I would rate Pbwiki.com much higher.
8. Drew Olanoff
   June 19th, 2006 at 5:37 am Doesn’t seem useful at all. The edit interface is slick, yes. But overall, it seems like a clone of things I’ve seen already.
9. Markus
   June 19th, 2006 at 6:13 am I was “lucky” enough to get an invite to be a beta tester for this service when the beta was privately launched. Didn’t bother then, won’t bother now. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this company brushed into the web2.0 bust bin when the dust settles. The interface is NOT easy to use - it’s actually quite cluttered and unintuitive. And the biggest downfall? What’s the motivation here? You will allow me to create a wiki so you can earn contextual ad revenue and I get a nice pat on the back? If I take the time to do it, I better see at least some sort of revenue share. My advice: go with mediawiki or pbwiki.
10. Jason
    June 19th, 2006 at 6:48 am I just read your post about Wetpaint and you seem to be missing the point. You talk about Digg being good for saving time, Wetpaint’s thing is that its EASY. Its obvious their going after the mainstream - its hard to be easy and I think they’ve done a great job.
11. Christopher
    June 19th, 2006 at 7:27 am I set one up pretty quickly and thought the interface was pretty cool. For that ‘mass-edited’ crowd that wants a simple way to create a wiki - (i.e. Blogger.com or hosted Movable Type), it seems to hit the mark. I agree that they should try to hit Safari and Opera in the future, as that could turn off some niche Wikis, I think the average person creating a wiki would be pretty eager to roll with this.
12. Ayon J Rayman
    June 19th, 2006 at 7:44 am I tried it out this morning. Seems very nice. My biggest complaint is I couldn’t figure out a way to get any kind of RSS feed into the pages or get RSS feeds of the pages out to another site/reader. I wonder why they left it out.
13. Tamara
    June 19th, 2006 at 9:08 am So, consider the audience here. Techcrunch attracts tons of…techies. Like me. But Wetpaint is doing something for the non-techies of the world. It’s pretty easy to be critical when we’ve all seen all the other web 2.0 widgets out there–but how many of them make it really easy for regular people to do things like create a entire collaborative site? Yes, the ui needs some cleaning, and RSS support and cross-browser support are, i’m assuming, on their way. But I think it’s way cool that regular people can create entire sites really fast with this thing. To me, the ease of use is the story here, and the fact that Wetpaint is built for ‘regular’ people — many, many of whom are still totally intimidated by stuff us techies don’t even bother to think about anymore.
14. mamamia
    June 19th, 2006 at 9:30 am biggest problem…how many freaking “i’m an expert” sites are there? i love the look and feel of this…and can see a buyout in the near future, but really…where are you going to go for “expert advice”?…wetpaint, squiddoo, wikipedia, etc. if google or apple buys this out, then this will explode. (ironic that it doesn’t support safari when it looks like an apple site).
15. DotsMedia
    June 19th, 2006 at 10:06 am Well this site is another cloned wikis like squidoo.com or oozm.com or other many wikis out there. I don’t see anything unique that makes it different.
16. pos
    June 19th, 2006 at 10:19 am A wiki my ass, what a peice of crap, wiki’s are open source collaborative efforts, not closed cms ad driven systems, a real pos.
17. Erik Kalviainen
    June 19th, 2006 at 10:22 am I have to agree with cram and Markus that pbwiki is perhaps a better product. At least, I don’t see many advantages that Wetpaint offers other than a WYSIWYG editor. I’ve looked at Wetpaint several times now (including the first time it was written about on TC), and each time I am disappointed by its failure to deliver the features and overall style that I would like to see in their product. Having said that, I find myself waiting and wondering when they’ll get it right.
18. Phil
    June 19th, 2006 at 11:49 am Are there any keyboard shortcuts for this Wiki interface? I don’t have three hands. For instance: * If I’ve finished typing a wiki edit and simply want to hit “Save”, can I do that without bothering with a mouse? I can’t tab out to a submit button like I can with most forms.
    * What if I want to ‘'’embolden text”’ and don’t want to move my hand over to a mouse or select text? - and if I can do that, can we have a potted description of the commonest-used formatting syntax?
    * If I’m absolutely forced to use the “EasyEdit toolbar” to do formatting, are there accesskeys (ALT+key combinations that are a piece of cake to code into links and buttons on any webpage) for it?
19. tkdan235
    June 19th, 2006 at 11:56 am pbwiki blows everyone away. Use this crap and then use pbwiki and you will see why.
20. Mike
    June 19th, 2006 at 12:12 pm Per Phil’s comments - there are shortcuts for the basics similar to MSFT word. Bold, italics, underline and save are the standard ctrl + keys all seem to work very well for me. Not sure about the others but I’d be they’ll be on the way soon if they’re that easy.
21. Ayon J Rayman
    June 19th, 2006 at 2:58 pm The interface isn’t very intuitive. Granted, some basic functions are easy, but I had a heard time trying to figure out how to apply/use a template.
22. Nathan Waters
    June 19th, 2006 at 4:15 pm Maybe it’s just me, but I still find the good old MediaWiki to be more professional than this. It seems like a MySpace equivalent for the wiki… i.e. big flashing ajax editting UI, lots of things happening on the same page etc.
23. EA
    June 19th, 2006 at 8:44 pm I have to agree with there being no ‘opera’ plugin making it sandpaperish, but hey, I have been waiting a long time for this, well somewhat, even though the GIMP ‘could’ make the whole conversation worthless, if, there was a drive with the open sourcers to really take Linux beyond the sky.

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