JotSpot Family: A Wiki For Your Family

The last time I tried Jotspot  was over a year ago and I wasn’t very impressed. It had just launched, didn’t work very well with a Mac and overall I didn’t see what Jotspot offered that other wikis didn’t. Since that time though, the Jotspot team has been hard at work releasing wikis geared toward specific uses like a call log manager, meeting manager and twelve other business and community geared applications. Last night I decided to try out the Jotspot Family wiki which they offer for free unlike the others that start at $9.95 for 10 users and a limit of 100 pages. I’d have to say I was pretty impressed with what they’ve done since my last visit.

Setting up the new wiki was extremely simple and in under an hour I had blogged, created a photo gallery, built a family tree and entered a few family birthdays. About the only thing I didn’t do was add to the family recipe book, but that has more to do with my lack of culinary skills than anything else. Jotspot gives you nine types of pages to begin and you can also create and add your own as well. A wiki can often be difficult to use which results in people shying away from it. I felt so confident that Jotspot Family was so easy to use that my grandma was one of the first people I sent an invitation to join the new family site I had set up.

Knowing that people either don’t understand wikis yet or have tried and were scared away I think Jotspot is taking an interesting approach to attract users to the other applications by giving away the Family wiki for free. People like me will create accounts for their family and in turn get the concept of a wiki to a new group of users. From that new group of users I am sure Jotspot hopes to attract some of them over to the other applications that bring in the revenue.