MindTouch Powers-Up DekiWiki with Dapper
Open source wiki vendor MindTouch is releasing a series of major new features Monday and some of them are quite interesting. People used to talk about MindTouch for its outlandish stunts - like working with nutball John Gotts on the short-lived Wiki.com platform …
Context & Ripple Effects
MindTouch enters 2008 trying to move past its stunt-era reputation — the short-lived Wiki.com venture with John Gotts that ReadWriteWeb says people used to define the company by — and the Dapper integration in Monday's DekiWiki release is the substance behind that pivot: the open-source wiki can now pull structured content from third-party websites directly into wiki pages.
The move lands in a crowded field. Socialtext's November 2007 relaunch showed enterprise wiki vendors repositioning around richer feature sets, while Wikia's push toward an editable Web search engine signaled that wiki players broadly see themselves as layers over web-wide data rather than isolated page collections. MindTouch's answer is to make the wiki itself the mashup surface.
First-order effects
- DekiWiki users gain the ability to aggregate live third-party web content inside wiki pages, turning MindTouch's product from a collaborative document store into a lightweight data-mashup platform.
- MindTouch gets a concrete differentiator against enterprise rivals like Socialtext at exactly the moment those vendors are competing on feature depth rather than price.
Second-order effects
- Competing wiki vendors face pressure to add equivalent data-aggregation capabilities or cede the 'wiki as integration hub' positioning to MindTouch, accelerating feature-race dynamics in a market already consolidating around platform plays.
- Dapper, as the extraction layer underneath these integrations, gains distribution through MindTouch's open-source install base — making third-party site data a raw input for other people's applications.
Third-order effects
- If wikis keep absorbing external data feeds, the line between collaboration tools and portal/dashboard software blurs, and the contested question becomes who has the right to republish another site's structured content — a permission-boundary issue the wiki ecosystem has no settled answer for.
The trend: Wiki platforms are evolving from standalone collaborative pages into aggregation layers that pipe external web data into enterprise workflows, with each vendor racing to own that integration surface.