Google Docs captures the essence of wikis

In an interesting posting called Is it still a wiki, my colleague Dorthe Jespersen recently made the valid point that a wiki in essence is about co-creation of content. As a frequent user of Google Docs, I would argue that the free web-based word processor and spreadsheet from Google enables exactly the same thing.

In our company we have used a wiki internally since May 2007. We basically use it as our intranet, with daily updates on the frontpage, and we also use it to manage projects such as our conferences, Community of Practice and research projects. We’ve learned quite a bit over the months, e.g. about naming pages, linking and working with tables. Moreover, earlier this year we started using Google Docs. Adoption has been slow, but growing. It is really neat when several individuals are working on the same document or spreadsheet and you can collaborate in real-time and still track changes. We are continually learning and debating when to use the wiki and when to use Google Docs.

As Dorthe also pointed out, people do tend to react strongly to wikis. Earlier this year, Jane McConnell described this as either wiki magic or wiki panic. Google Docs is not a wiki, but it can still be helpful for knowledge sharing and other of the scenarios in which wikis are traditionally deployed.

As a final note, I noticed a recent posting on the market share of Google Docs, which compared it against Word and Open Office. That might be what it appears like at first glance, but I suspect some of the so-called business social software vendors, are simply beginning to feel some heat from Google.

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