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In July, Phil Butler called the Deki Wiki enterprise wiki software from MindTouch "the most extendable Wiki tool available today." He wrote that the company was "transforming the Wiki, from the Web??™s best collaborative authoring tool into an open source service platform with a Wiki heart."

While it seems that Google will imminently be joining the wiki market, Deki Wiki has been busy beefing up their already mature offering.

The crown jewel of the Deki Wiki platform is their web-services extension model, which lets people create application mashups in their wiki. "For example, users can compose applications from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in a wiki page with content they author or aggregate from databases, other applications, or from across the Web," wrote co-founder Aaron Fulkerson in a blog post yesterday.

Since we wrote about the Deki Wiki product in July, MindTouch has added dozens of new extensions amounting to over 100 new features, according to the company. These include support for Google Maps, Blogs, News, and Video, Flickr images, Microsoft Live Virtual Earth, and Live Contacts, a tie-in with ThinkFree for viewing Microsoft Office files, Yahoo! finance data and others.

MindTouch is also announcing today the release of two desktop products, the Deki Wiki Desktop and Microsoft Outlook Connectors. The Desktop Connector lets users browse and search for files on their computers and add them to their wiki project via drag and drop. The Outlook Connector makes it easier for users to publish email messages, attachments, and contact information to a wiki page.

Deki Wiki is free and open source. You can head on over to the OpenGarden Sandbox page to give it a whirl.

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A new version of Delicious (sans dots) was released as a private preview today. I got an invite and have been poking around. Techcrunch got the exclusive on the story, so they have a full review up. But in my initial quick tests, a couple of features immediately stood out for me. We've written a number of times before on Read/WriteWeb about how del.icio.us, sorry Delicious, can be used as a very effective search engine. Likewise, Alex Iskold has also written before about Delicious as a recommendation system:

"...the del.icio.us approach holds intriguing possibilities of self-organizing classification and recommendation systems. With enough users and more tweaking, social tagging can result in a system that works equally well for books, wine and music."

In another post, Alex also called it a "a gem of hidden information". Indeed, given that some of the comments on our 10 Future Web Trends post suggested crowd sourcing as a future trend worth watching, it seems to me that Delicious as a general crowd-sourced search solution is close to becoming a reality. As an example, a quick search for "web future" in Delicious Preview displayed a lot of popular (and some very old) links. But they were quality links, useful resources. Which is mostly what you want from a search engine.

So Delicious Preview is kind of like PageRank, only it's run via crowd sourcing. It's not an algorithm that primarily determines results (although that is a part of it), but thousands of 'votes' by Delicious users.

Another thing worth noting is Delicious' move towards becoming a social network, as founder Joshua Schachter spoke to R/WW about exactly one year ago. Some of these networking features are already on the current del.icio.us, but have become more refined in the new version. Here's a couple of screenshots.

Overall, Delicious still feels like an experiment in progress. But there could be profound implications for Delicious' owner, Yahoo - particularly in search. Yahoo is known to be pushing 'social search' as a way to compete with Google (Answers, Flickr, Delicious, etc), and the new Delicious Preview is another move in refining that vision.

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As it’s the beginning of August, here on the b5media Business Channel each of us is riffing on some or other aspect of the meaning of “small a” august.Incidentally, this word is just one example of the challenge for people whose first language is not English, in learning how to pronounce English words: the month [...]

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Hello Folks!We here at the SMO blog are all huge football fans, and we wanted to reach out to all the other football fans in the SEO/SMO/SEM/Web community with our first annual SMO blog Fantasy Football League.Do you like football?Do you like fantasy football?Do you like winning?Do you not work/live in the Seattle area and [...]

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I sat up and took notice yesterday when email from eMarketer arrived. HeadedChinese Tiger Roars Online, the message included some impressive statistics drawn from a new report, China Online Overview.A current growth rate of 30% in China’s online population puts the country on course to soon pass the USA in having the most Internet users [...]

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The extremely popular Where I've Been Facebook app is today launching a MySpace widget, making it perhaps the first application developed specifically for Facebook that has made the jump to another platform. The app's creator, Craig Ulliot, also recently formed Where I??™ve Been, LLC to manage the application and its growing networking of users.

According to Where I've Been, the application is the most popular travel networking app on Facebook with 2.6 million users (though as of today, it was ranked second in the travel category using Facebook's newer active users metric behind TripAdvisor's "City's I've Been To" app). Where I've Been is adding 30,000 new users every day -- not bad for a company launched in June.

MySpace users can add the widget to their MySpace profiles from the company's web site. Judging from the site, which reference features like a travel blog and global travel guide, Where I've Been is planning to expand beyond just MySpace and leverage its popularity to build an external travel social network.

That's speculation on my part, but their press release about the MySpace widget calls Where I've Been, LLC a "start-up company dedicated to developing software for the travel social networking space" and references their Facebook app as their "first product." I think extracting data from a Facebook app to an external site and expanding to other social networks is a smart move.

One of the main criticisms of building an application specifically for a single social platform is that you're essentially putting all of your eggs in one basket. But Where I've Been has shown that Facebook can serve as an amazing catalyst for building a quick user base, which can then be leveraged to expand behind the confines of the Facebook platform. I expect that other Facebook app developers will follow suit by launching on other social networks or by extracting data to outside, standalone web sites.

Last month it was rumored that TripAdvisor had purchased Where I've Been for $3 million, which would have been the largest acquisition of a Facebook-only application to date. The purchase was denied by both sides.

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At the Office 2.0 Conference today, Web Office vendor Zoho will unveil a new Suite product called Zoho Business. It will be available in two versions - Free and Pro. Both versions will be free until Zoho has sorted out the feature set for Pro over the beta period, expected to last until Q1 2008. At that point the Pro version will have a charge - mooted to be $40/user/year.

Zoho Business is a set of online office applications, similar to Google Apps. It will probably undercut Google Apps in price - at $40/user/year, it would be $10 per user cheaper than Google Apps. Zoho Business will be available in private beta for now, then move into public beta next month. It will go 1.0 during Q1 2008.

As yet the features for the Pro version haven't been confirmed. But Zoho told Read/WriteWeb that it'll include additional storage, security, telephone support, additional apps, customization and more control, more flexibility and control in groups, and more. These features will evolve as the Web Office market evolves over the next few months, we were told.

As part of the announcement, Zoho's applications will be split into two categories: Zoho Personal and Zoho Business. Zoho Personal is what is currently offered for free to consumers. The Business suite is obviously aimed at businesses and this is where Zoho will finally make money, after a long time giving their products away for free (in the spirit of web 2.0).

Some of the main features of Zoho Business:

• Company level Admin Console
• Domain Management (for pointing your domains to Zoho Apps)
• Centralized User and Group Management
• Single Sign-on across several Zoho Apps
• Zoho Apps include Writer, Sheet, Show, Wiki, Notebook, Email, Cal, Tasks, Planner, Viewer, Chat etc.
• Customization Options
• Multiple levels of Security including SSL
• Remote Backup
• Telephone Support

The following video has more details and also see the screenshots below.

Zoho Business Control Panel

Zoho Business, Spreadsheet view

Disclosure: Zoho is a R/WW sponsor

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