Google Buys Wiki Startup JotSpot

Google, while waiting for the ink to dry on the YouTube deal, has started its acquisition engine up again with a purchase of the online collaboration startup JotSPot. We are being told to that this acquisition may have to do with Google Office.

The announcement was made public on Tuesday.  Separate postings on Google's and JotSpot's company blogs have confirmed the speculation.

As per JotSpot CEO and Co-Founder Joe Kraus on the Google Blog, "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."

The terms of the acquisition are confidential and the deal is officially closed. Sign-ups are suspended until that transition is completed.

JotSpot, a privately held company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, is the first application wiki company. Founded in 2004 by Excite.com co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, the company is pioneering do-it-yourself application publishing to enable anyone to create, publish, and share collaborative and personalized wiki applications. While other wikis only support plain old text, JotSpot's wiki allows you to create rich web-based spreadsheets, calendars, documents and photo galleries. It's as easy as using a word processor — you don't need to know HTML. Thousands of businesses are using JotSpot to manage projects, build an intranet, share files and stay in sync with colleagues and customers.

Focusing on collaborative products may also help Google attract more users to Internet apps, which is one of the search company's goals. The more people who work online, the larger the audience for Google advertising.