JotSpot Returns as “Google Sites”

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

JotSpot was acquired by Google in October 2006, and since then it’s basically disappeared. Last night, however, Google added a new service to Google Apps: Google Sites, incorporating the JotSpot tech, though it looks nothing like the original product.

The original JotSpot site described their product as:

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.

That’s still the same, but rather than using the structured templates that JotSpot rolled out in the 2.0 version, you get some very basic templates (above, click to enlarge):

• Web Page
• Dashboard
• Announcements
• File Cabinet
• List

There are a bunch of themes with names like Toothpaste and Wintermint, though. And you can easily embed stuff from Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube, and Picasa.

Still, at its core Sites is a way for teams to build collaborative websites, and that’s unchanged. Google says:

Google Sites, a new offering from Google Apps, makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. Use Google Sites to centralize all types of information — from videos to presentations — and share your site with just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.

Just as with Docs, you can make Sites private, public, or shared. Users can subscribe to a site to be informed of site or even page changes, however you’re limited to 10GB of storage space for files and site content - which is still pretty generous.

No, it’s not a Sharepoint-killer. But as with anything Google, it’s bound to draw a lot of interest. And as with most things Google, yep - it’s beta (note to Google: it might be safe to remove the “beta” label from Gmail now).