JotSpot Photo Gallery

And today's acquisition by Google, is JotSpot, following their recent purchases of YouTube and Neven Vision.

JotSpot is a hosting platform for providing wikis, but it goes beyond the normal range of (mostly) text wikis, by offering a rich application platform, including a number of preprogrammed web applications that can be included within your JotSpot wiki.

One of these is the JotSpot photo gallery.

This offers the ability to

• Create albums and upload photos
• Thumbnail and slideshow views of your photo albums
• Comment on photos when they are uploaded
• View photo info (EXIF) for uploaded photos
• View a photo stream of recently added photos across all albums
• Read a comment stream of recently added comments across all albums

Hardly earth shattering I know, but the very fact that that list is so familiar is indicative of the fact that photo galleries are an intrinsic part of the wide collaborative platform that the web is becoming.  The ability to comment on photos in a gallery, and to get streams of information when more comments or photos are added is a very useful feature.

Picasa Web Albums offers these features of course, and I don't see that the JotSpot Photo Gallery will replace the Picasa Web, but the obvious "fit" for JotSpot's collaborative approach is within the "Documents and Spreadsheets" package that Google already offer.  Picasa Web has a foothold there already, appearing as a "photos" link within the spreadsheets and other documents, and I think that this move is likely to help make this a closer integration.  At the moment you can add just a short caption to the photos appearing in a Picasa Web Album, but close integration could see photos appearing as part of much richer collaborative documents - as cells in spreadsheet for example, or embedded within paragraphs of text in a word processor document.

Even just the ability to add more to the photo album pages themselves within Picasa Web would be immensely useful - I've seen a good number of requests by users to add counters or analytics code to the pages, and JotSpot is all about the ability to easily change page content, so would provide a useful model to follow.

Google makes acquisitions for a number or reasons - including to acquire technology, and to acquire people.  JotSpot certainly has some bright people, and although the wiki technology may be far from unique, it was packaged well.  I look forward to seeing the wiki ideals of easy collaboration making their presence more widespread in other Google properties, and Picasa Web looks a prime candidate for many of these ideas to show up first.

There's a number of posts from Google about this - the main Google Blog carries the announcement of the deal and a follow up that notes how Google have been pushing the collaborative angle for a while already, moving  "calendars, photos and documents onto the web".  Of course the JotSpot blog now also becomes another Google blog as well, and Ken Norton's personal blog also relates the news.