JotSpot

» see jotspot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

jotspot launched in the summer of 2004 as a hosted wiki aimed at businesses. it was joe kraus and graham spencer's second startup, after they had already sold excite to at home for something like six billion dollars in 1999 and watched that number evaporate over the next two years. jotspot was a smaller idea done more carefully. a wiki you did not have to install, with structured pages for expense reports and project trackers and meeting notes on top of the freeform text.

in fairness the pitch was reasonable for the moment. wikipedia had made the wiki idea normal by 2004. businesses were starting to notice but did not want to run a mediawiki install on their own hardware. jotspot's angle was that a small team could sign up, pay per user, and get a wiki that already understood common office tasks. there were competitors doing similar work (socialtext, confluence in its early years). jotspot was the one with the excite money and the media around it.

none of this touched my life at the time. i was a computer engineering student in ankara in 2004, on ttnet dsl at home and lab machines at university. the wiki i knew was wikipedia. the collaboration tool i knew was msn messenger. business wikis were enterprise software, and i was not near any enterprise. jotspot's whole customer base was the sort of small us company that read techcrunch and adopted new saas products from that reading. that was not turkey in 2004.

google bought jotspot on 31 october 2006 for an undisclosed sum, in the same week it announced the youtube deal, which absorbed almost all the press attention. jotspot's 27 employees moved to mountain view. new signups were closed off within days of the acquisition. existing customers kept their accounts, google stopped charging them, and the whole thing entered the sixteen-month quiet period where google acquisitions used to disappear before coming back with a new name.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rebrand ~

on 27 february 2008 the same product came back as google sites, and jotspot as a brand was done. the underlying code was largely what jotspot had been building, adapted for the google apps for domains suite. sites got the wiki structure and the page templates. the pricing model changed to fit into the apps bundle. the jotspot.com domain kept redirecting for a while but the name was retired the same day google sites was announced.

this is the pattern that runs through a lot of google's mid-2000s acquisitions. buy a small saas company, integrate the engineers, retire the brand, ship the product under a google name. writely became google docs. keyhole became google earth. jotspot became google sites. urchin became google analytics. the acquired product usually kept most of its original shape, minus the founders' branding.

~ the long tail ~

the migration for existing jotspot customers ran through 2008 and 2009 and finished in early 2010. some jotspot features never made it across (the structured page types for expense reports and calendars were dropped or thinned out). the plain wiki pages carried over. by the time the last legacy jotspot url stopped resolving, most of the customers who cared had either moved to sites or moved off google entirely.

joe kraus stayed at google as a product manager and later moved to google ventures. graham spencer also stayed. neither of them started another consumer product after this. the excite second-act was less dramatic than the excite first act, but it also did not end in the same way, this one just ended by being absorbed into a bigger company that eventually replaced most of it.

~ what got buried ~

google sites classic itself was later killed too, deprecated in 2020 and fully shut in 2021 in favor of the newer sites redesign. so the jotspot code that ran google sites for over a decade did eventually die, just under a different name and about thirteen years after its original brand. the underlying idea, that small teams should have a hosted collaborative wiki without running their own install, ended up being right. confluence won that market instead. notion and coda later reshaped it again.

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