Review: Wetpaint wiki (4/5)

I've been looking for a good hosted wiki product lately to document some of the projects I'm working on.  I don't really want to deal with installing and hosting it myself--not that I couldn't, I just really would rather spend an hour or two or whatever it would take, and then maintain the server.

None of the existing hossted wiki products that I'm aware of did what I needed them to do or were user-friendly enough to pick up and use.  SocialText, for example.  I wouldn't really mind paying a monthly fee for a good experience (take TypePad for my blog, for example), but when I need to consult the documentation just to learn how to create a link to another page, it kind of turns me off to the product.

So when I read in TechCrunch about Wetpaint, I decided to take it for a whirl.  That's one thing I love about Web apps:  you can try them out for a few minutes and then never touch them again if you hate them, and it doesn't clutter up your registery or hard drive or anything else (except  your email I suppose).  So I signed up for Wetpaint (which is free and ad-supported by the way) and created a couple of wikis.

Wetpaint does have it's rough edges, but overall it's the best blogging software I've seen yet.  It makes it extremely easy for anyone to open it up and start adding content, even if you've never seen it before.  The user interface is just fantastic in my opinion, this is what Web apps should aspire to be.  You pretty much know at all times what everything is on the page, and you know how to do what you're trying to do.

It does have it's drawbacks, but they're definitely not enough to keep me from using it.  The text editor is very limited (for example you can't change colors or edit the HTML directly) and you can't attach files to a page.  I can honestly say that keeping people to one color/font will probably improve the readability of many of the wikis I've seen :)  Not being able to add files to a page is a headache for a wiki about an open source development project, but I will struggle thru it so that I can use the rest of the software.  It's that good.