Socialtext Unplugged Merges Online, Offline Work
by Jerry Bowles
The key drawback to widespread adoption of Web Office applications as an alternative to you-know-who’s Office products is the simple, but profound, problem that they are accessible by users only when they are connected to the internet. What good is a Google spreadsheet if you’re on your laptop halfway across the Atlantic with no connection to access it?
Socialtext, the enterprise wiki company, took an important step toward solving this problem yesterday when CEO Ross Mayfield introduced Socialtext Unplugged, an offline wiki that allows you to download the applications as a single zip file, unzip and work on it on your unconnected computer, and then synch it through Socialtext Web Services the next time you’re online.
Unplugged was developed collaboratively by Socialtext with Jeremy Ruston of Osmosoft, the creator of TiddlyWiki. Truth is, most of the software architecture is pure TiddlyWiki but Socialtext provides Roston an entre to the enterprise marketplace and considerable marketing clout.
So what happens if two users make revisions and update with the server at about the same time?
“It works the same way an online wiki does,” Mayfield says. “When there is a conflict between two editors, the last editor (in this case, the person who may have been Unplugged) is presented with the difference and asked to merge the contributions, or save over. With Unplugged, a user is presented with a list of changed pages at the time of synch.”
This is Socialtext’s second step toward merging online and offline apps. Back in June, the company announced a partnership with Dan Bricklin (inventor of VisiCalc) to exclusively distribute, redistribute and co-develop wikiCalc, a “social spreadsheet” that also allows multiple users to work offline and update when connected. A revision history tracks who made what changes and when.
You can try Socialtext Unplugged at the Socialtext Customer Exchange or Open Source Wiki.
