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Socialtext offers wikis "to go"

One of the services my small consultancy offers is helping organizations figure out which online product would actually help them be more effective in their work.  This is a very different sales pitch from someone used to the breathless techno-boosterism of larger consulting partnerships.

Wikis are a hard sell.  It's something I spend a fair bit of time trying to figure out...

-One of the reasons, I suspect, is that there are so many other - competing - mechanisms for groups to share information. (email, shared documents and document systems, calendaring systems, blogs...) 
-'Publishing/vetting standards" of Wikipedia notwithstanding, another reason may be that wikis do best when the group is comfortable with shooting small -- and often half-baked -- ideas to and fro.' 

What if the comfort of your QWERTY keyboard was taken away and you had to do the best you could with pithy little exchanges? 

As in, say, handheld devices...

No-one's going to write a polished formal argument using their two thumbs.  And even if they did, they'd invoke the wrath of subsequent readers who tried to absorb their thoughts by way of a 2-square-inch display screen. 

So maybe, just maybe, one of the most likely to succeed environments for wiki use is the input/output-challenged world of hand-held devices.

Until now, no-one has laid claim to this possibility.

Until Socialtext, that is.

Socialtext has begun to offer a screen-and-command tweaked version of its wikis specifically for these small devices.

I'd wager this is a big deal.

Here's a piece from ZiffDavis Net.

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http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2818

April 5, 2006

Socialtext's Miki mobile wiki

Posted by Dan Farber @ 6:59 am

Digg This!

 

 

I was chatting with Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText at Software 2006 yesterday, checking out his company's new Miki–what he calls the first mobile wiki–on his Nokia N90 phone. It's wikis 'to go,' optimized for any mobile Web browser and users collaborating on projects anytime, anywhere. Miki is included in any Socialtext edition, which include Personal (free for five users) to Professional ($95 for 20 users) to Enterprise (Appliance deployments start at $9,995). Ross thinks that the free Personal Miki edition could serve as a "private notepad" from the cloud to your pocket. Miki is part of a growing trend–increasingly, the full spectrum of social and collaborative software is becoming device agnostic, blurring the lines between fixed and mobile usage and personal and business use.

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