David Emery Online

Buy Buy Buy

31 October 2006

To follow their YouTube acquisition, Google have now bought JotSpot, one of the leading provider of Wiki-based collaboration software.

This is another very, very clever move by Google; they’ve really turned around in the last few months – from looking like they were slowly but surely loosing their edge with misfires like Google Page Creator and Google Video, with their recent purchases they’re looking a lot stronger. JotSpot is a company with a very compelling product suite – while “wiki” is the headline buzzword, JotSpot not only has refined the concept, they’ve also added a boat load of collaboration features that make the product really compelling to enterprise and business use.

So what’s cooking over at Google? This is obviously another piece in the “Google Office” puzzle, which now comprises a word processor, a spreadsheet, email, calendar, collaboration suite, chat and more. The collaboration aspect of this is going to be the killer blow here, I think – which is why this purchase makes a whole load of sense. Certainly where I work Word and Excel are used as not much more then rich text editors and basic number crunchers – the small amount of features that “Google Office” may lack is more then made up for by the ability to easily enable multi-author editing with ease.

The other buy-out of the day was Condé Nast/Wired acquiring Reddit. If you haven’t heard of Reddit, it’s another site based purly on user submitted content, much in the same vein as Digg and Slashdot.

This purchase, however, isn’t as smart as Google’s, although it doesn’t surprise me too much coming from an old-school media company like Condé Nast. Put simply, Reddit isn’t a very good site. It’s popularity, I think at least, is fairly fleeting and in any case not that large – it’s certainly got nowhere near the amount of users the aforementioned sites have.

Quite frankly, they would have better spent their money integrating digg-style user story submission and ranking into the Wired – due to Wired’s large existing community I think they could have easily created a site with a higher profile then Reddit while at the same time boosting one of their existing brands. The fit would have been perfect.

The thing to learn from this acquisition is that just because a site uses user generated content doesn’t mean that you can’t create a similar community from scratch yourself. With a site such as YouTube the brand is so successful with so many users that it’s not worth it – it’s practically impossible to built a video site from scratch and generate that user base without spending a huge amount on marketing. However, if you already have a successful brand, and the site isn’t in an insurmountable position then it probably isn’t worth it.