At the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Socialtext released Socialtext Open. Socailtext distribution includes wikiCalc, which is the social spreadsheet, and Wikiwfg, and WYSIWYG editor. Very interesting products.

If you want to read more, TechCrunch has a posting by Marshall Kirkpatrick, “SocialText aims for wiki 2.0.” And of course, there are podcasts. Kirsten Jones talked to Perlcast about the REST API beta. The podcast is available along with reading material. Last month, CEO Ross Mayfield joined Phil Windley, Matt Asay, and Scott C. Lemon in a review of the technology news of the week. Before Wikimania 2006, InfoWorld’s Jon Udell had a podcast with Ross Mayfeild about Socialtext’s decision to release Socialtext Open and its relationship with WikiCalc. PodTech has Ross Mayfield talking with Andrew McAfee about Web 2.0 for Enterprise. Jennifer Jones talked with Ross about wikis and their use for companies both large and small in the podcast “Delving Into the Real Value of Wikis.” There is a video cast at the start of this month entitled, “Inside the first Wiki Company, SocialText.” PodTech has additional podcast/video cast available at their site.

It is an interesting company and leader in the Wiki world.

http://www.softwaregarden.com/wkcalpha/

and Socialtext Open Source is available at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/socialtext/

If you have not done so, you might want to listen to the podcast:

IT Conversations: Ross Mayfield

Why the interest? GLORIAD works with people across the globe. Collaboration tools that help people work together, whether they be in the next office or across the globe, are essential.

To quote Ron Mayfield, “Wikis and Blogs have from their very beginning afforded open source and open APIs. They make great containers for orchestrating web services to form composite applications, or for being mashed up elsewhere. And more importantly, they are collaboration and communication tools that demand and enable redesign of applications. Not just slapping them on a web page.”

Open source and open APIs are what Web 2.0 is all about, and where the industry is going. This is the very thing we are talking about when we begin to discuss Service Oriented Architecture. Check out Dave Linthicum blog and podcast on SOA. When it comes to software, my focus is not on how easy it is to implement, but how well it will integrate into the whole scheme. People will recommend products that are nicely put together as a suite of services. The problem is, it is a closed system. It is all about open APIs. That is what is going to allow us to integrate the information, or if you prefer to do mashups, with other software both in existence today and that which will be introduced in the future. Who knows how we will be processing information a year from now?  Companies using open APIs, like Google, are helping us bring together information in ways we would not have thought of a few years ago.

In the end, I like the philosophy of Socialtext. I’m not sure of the user interface, but on the backend they seem to have a good design approach. I’ll see how hard it is, if it all possible, on a Mac OS X.