What You Wiki Is What You Get
There is a certain necessity to maintaining a core architectural model that’s faithful to the basic wiki tool set, to be sure. But, by and large, wikis are executionally identical to one another when taken on the merits of design (that is, they all look like Wikipedia), and their particular methods of articulating interface widgets might best be labeled as “slavish.”
There’s a lot of room for design innovation in this space, especially as enterprises begin using wikis as collaborative tools more and more, which means that they will start turning to design studios (hopefully ones like ours) for implementation help — golden opportunities for scrappy designers to produce some truly innovative productivity solutions. At the risk of inflating the Ajax hype balloon a bit further: a wiki tool that combines the power of the format’s native interaction model with the fluid and transparent responsiveness of remote scripting will be a huge hit.
So I was feeling proud of myself for coming to this clever design revelation and all on my own, too, until I read, over at 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise weblog, a very clear intimation that their next product release is going to be a wiki. And then I felt behind the curve all over again.
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