There is increasing interest in companies working on social network mapping and analysis software [1 2]. One such company is Socialtext. From their site:
Tools like wikis and weblogs make it easy to write on the web. With these tools, people communicate, collaborate, and build knowledge. Naturally. It’s as fast as email. As responsive as writing on a whiteboard.
Nice Little Wiki is a simple wiki engine initially created by Socialtext to serve as a prototype for us to try out some of our ideas about social software. We also use it internally as our intranet and company management tool.
Nice Little Wiki will be an open source project, soon to be published under a BSD or Apache-style license.
There’s further explanation on wikis:
What’s a wiki? A wiki (Hawaiian for “quick”) is a web tool used for information sharing and collaborative writing.
How do you use a wiki? You can write directly on wiki pages simply by clicking “Edit This Page.” You can make a link to another page simply by typing the title of the page.
What do you use a wiki for? People use wikis for collaborative software development, writing documents together, taking notes, building archives and encyclopedias, and many other applications.
What’s so great about wikis? Writing wiki pages is fast, like writing email. Collaborating with wikis is fast and satisfying, like taking turns at a whiteboard. Making information resources with wikis is natural, because you can reorganize as you go, like moving the chairs in your living room.
What’s different about Nice Little Wiki? Nice Little Wiki has a couple of differences from typical wikis. First of all, it’s password-protected, so you can create private spaces. Second, you create links between wiki pages by putting brackets around the page name, instead of using CamelCase.
One space which is becoming hot, building on our understanding of how networks form, is collaboration management – helping get the most out of ad-hoc groups and the tacit knowledge in people. SocialText is in the same space.
