SocialText Wiki Goes Offline

By Brice Dunwoodie | Published Dec 11, 2006

SocialText Wiki Unplugged Today at the Le Web 3 conference here in Paris, SocialText CEO, Ross Mayfield unveiled their latest big thing, SocialText Unplugged. The new feature allows users to click an icon to take portions of their wiki content offline, then re-sync once they are connected again.

To quote Ross, “On my way here, I used it by clicking on the Unplug icon, downloading a collection of wiki pages, got on a plane and edited them offline. Landed, connected and synched up changes.”

As he explained in his panel discussion today in Paris, the blue Unplugged icon is meant to be a signal to the user, not unlike the prolific RSS icon. The RSS icon tells a visitor that the current website's content can be access via means other than the web browser (i.e, an RSS reader).

Ross maybe be aiming high, but he intends for his little blue icon to achieve somewhat similar status, in this case that the content can be taken offline and used meaningfully.

The SocialText Unplugged feature was collaboratively developed with Jeremy Ruston of Osmosoft. Jeremy's name may be familiar to CMSWire readers as he's the creator of fairly wacky TiddlyWiki Wiki tool. The TiddlyWiki product is a bit of a mind bender, but definitely worth getting your head around. We covered TiddlyWiki here a few months back.

Like TiddlyWiki, SocialText Unplugged is a self contained app that consists of a single HTML file. When the Unplug icon is clicked, the content is downloaded as a .zip archive. Re-synching any changes is a more sophisticated process which leverages Socialtext’s Wiki Web Services.