LOL. Wikis are *old* technology

I had just posted this and then a funny thought came to me:

LOL. Wikis are *old* technology.

Lotus Notes first appeared in 1989, but has much old roots of course. Meanwhile the WWW was invented in 1990, although it also origin backs in the 1980s. And of course the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was developed in 1994 and released into the wild in 1995.

So really, Wikis are an old technology, just as much as the old man of groupware, Lotus Notes. Except they’ve only been recently discovered by the business world. And as such, many  of the patterns of Enterprise 2.0 attributed to Wikis really aren’t that revolutionary. Actually, thinking about it further, the UI of most Wikis, particularly Mediawiki, aren’t that great. And I have heard stories of users struggling with the Wiki interface just like any other kind of information technology. For its part, when its comes to collaboration, SharePoint isn’t revolutionary either – just very popular!

If you have read or listened to any of my ideas on Intranet 2.0 you’ll know that I’ve divided that world into three main strategies:

1. Tactical (some social media in place, such as the odd Wiki or blog here and there);
2. Web-Orientated Intranets; and
3. (True) Enterprise 2.0.

So, how a about this: Stop claiming that Wikis = Enterprise 2.0, and I’ll stop going on about Lotus Notes. The only time that a Wiki is part of Enterprise 2.0 is when it is part of a greater Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem (i.e. there is evidence of SLATES) and a parallel organisational evolution taking place is observed.

Deal? ;-)

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