Jottit is Aaron Swartz’s new venture. I took it for a test drive, and confirmed that it is in line with Aaron’s approach for all his previous products. Pick any, and you will see too things - simplicity and minimalism, whether it is a web site like reddit or a framework like web.py.
What do I like about it?
Paul does an excellent job of explaining how simple it is really to start using jottit. It gets the biggest hurdle out of the way - getting users to try it. And there are some other things I love about it:
- It is quite rare to see a working version control or a history get a go ahead up before WYSIWYG editors. This is unique and provides a huge value.
- I see an tolerant approach, which allows change of even the subdomain. This reduces the tax on the user while deciding to come up with a name. It does a good job of letting the user postpone decisions about peripheral things and focus on content.
- I like the no-save approach. You change the value in the settings, and the changes are saved. No explicit save button. This might not work for others, but I think it rocks when hand-in-hand with simplicity.
- I also like that all pages under the site are automatically listed.
- Last but not the least, no artificial hype using invites drama.
Overall, the product really attracts users in trying it out, by removing any hurdles whatsoever. This can actually be a subject to study for others as well.
The Unknown
Well, the unknown part is the value that it provides. Unfortunately, I think it depends on how you see it, there is no absolute unique value. This might be in part, I think, because there might be bigger plans for it. And this perhaps gives a feeling of incompleteness to many.
There already are ways to create place for your own content, which are free and hosted by others. I have advising many to use WordPress.com, then there is also Squidoo, multiple places to create your own Wikis and the barebone ones like Google Pages. There is no single feature in jottit that makes it unique, however, the combination of the features together might appeal to some. It sites somewhere between a full-fledged wiki and pages, and offers higher value for lower baggage. In my opinion, the combination of ease of use and version control is tremendous. It might not be appropriate for a corporate or a product web site today, but it is ideal for someone to build a place for his/her content in the simplest way, without having to worry about any other thing.
It will be great if Aaron can provide a roadmap or some idea about its future. Or I wonder if he is waiting for his users to find its applications! We see no verticals, no specialization, no applications and no business intentions on the site, it is raw content today. The simplicity and minimalism has appealed to me and it is something I will ask my friends to check out if they want to build a place for themselves.
One technical thing I will really like to know if it uses web.py.
What do you think? Too simple, incomplete or right at the sweetspot?
September 17th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
personally, I like that the editor is just “plain text” and doesn’t mess with it, so I’ll use to keep a version control of my LaTeX files.
September 17th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
I IMHO think it does its job and basta. Nothing more, no silly widgets, or stuff… just simple and useful.
And, yes, Aaron confirmed it to me yesterday: it’s built with web.py
July 30th, 2008 at 12:23 am
I’m an old person who is also a university professor in graduate and post graduate courses. I am using jottit as a course wiki - absolutely fantastic. Since some of my students are also old people, they aren’t comfortable editing text. That’s okay. They send their edits or additions to me and I add them to the wiki. We are actually building a knowledgebase about web-based instruction which we will use in a how-to manual for publication.