Wiki Wave strikes Google as it acquires JotSpot

Google announced Tuesday that it has acquired JotSpot, a web 2.0 company which provides a hosted service mainly to corporate customers for building 'wikis'. Google's drive into software that helps users create and post their own materials on the Web will expand with this acquisition.

While the executives declined to disclose the amount that Google spent on acquiring the three-year-old company but unsurprisingly, they were eager to say how well the two company's online offerings fit together.

“As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online," JotSpot co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus wrote in a blog announcing the deal.

The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia which enable users to create material and modify and even delete material on which others in a group have worked is a popular presentation of Wiki tools.

The word ‘Wiki’ means ‘quick’ in Hawaiian, but since Wikipedia popularized it, it has acquired a new meaning -- online collaboration. According to JotSpot's Web site, its wikis "enable anyone to create, publish, and share collaborative and personalized wiki applications.”

Earlier this month Google has acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

"What's interesting is Google spent a bunch of time recently updating Google Groups and adding some wiki features to it," said Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence. "But JotSpot has a (collaborative) development platform, a bunch of applications in a nice package as well as users and a brand,” he said. "Google won't have to piece it all together from disparate parts."

With overlapping technology Google and JotSpot could prove to be an appealing combination.