Google Sites 1: A Wiki is Just a Website

On January 28th I noticed that Google was advertising what I think of as their wiki product, Google Sites, on their homepage at google.com. (It was gone by the 29th.) “New! Get your own website on Google Sites. It’s free and easy.” If you clicked through, here was the screen you got:

The word “wiki” was nowhere in sight.

And, indeed, a hosted wiki is a “free and easy way to create and share webpages.”

I’m not a student of Google but I guess that their brand is about simplifying to drive mass adoption. Perhaps that's a good lesson in how to be very clear and simple when explaining the what and how of collaborative software.

On the other hand, it's likely that Google knows that everyone wants a website and only a small percentage of people are really clamoring for a wiki. Yet, it's the same thing (in many ways) but I don't think I have fully internalized this myself.