Google adds wikis to its arsenal

Google's empire building has swallowed up JotSpot, a company which provides a hosted service to corporate customers building wikis.

In a blog post announcing the deal JotSpot co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus wrote: "We watched [Google] 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's product is a platform for building wiki-based applications that in some cases aren't all that different from Google's existing web applications. For example, the company has an online spreadsheet and calendar that multiple people can edit.

The JotSpot acquisition comes on the heels of news that Google plans to acquire the video-sharing site YouTube in a $1.65bn stock acquisition. While some viewed the massive deal as a repudiation of Google's own video sharing site experts say Google watchers shouldn't be so quick to make the same judgment on the JotSpot acquisition.

Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, said: "What's interesting is Google spent a bunch of time recently updating Google Groups and adding some wiki features to it. Google won't have to piece it all together from disparate parts."

The number of people using web-based applications are still a tiny sliver when compared to Microsoft's massive customer list for the Office desktop software suite but analysts suggest Google is mixing and matching pieces before finding the right combination to take Office head on.

Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at the Burton Group, said: "People have been expecting Google to make a frontal assault on Microsoft Office. But why pick a fight with where Office is today when you can look at where the web is going tomorrow?"

And O'Kelly doesn't think Google is done buying little companies in this arena. "This is really going to be a milestone in taking the wiki way of working to a different crowd, to casual developers," he said. "Say someone fluent in Excel macros or scripting languages."

Elinor Mills writes for News.com