WetPaint new on Friday, Old by Sunday
- By: John Andrews [privmsg - website] On 12th Mar 2006 In
Friday's quick post of links included WetPaint.com. Okay, so it took me till Sunday to look at it. Lucky me I didn't miss anything - the paint is still wet. The fun part is how smackingly-obviously this one reeks of Web2.0 puffery. Just about every aspect of it is panned in the online posts cited by it's own press page. For example...
TechCrunch posted about it here. They said it was a "new, super-slick wiki platform". They also say "Basically, its a highly user-friendly wysiwyg-type wiki platform...a hosted wiki solution... Wetpaint’s business model is to add contextual advertising to each page of the wiki...the company was founded last year and is backed by Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures"
SeattlePI.com is the only other post referenced on WetPaint.com's own press pages. They said
Backed with $5.25 million in venture capital financing, Wetpaint is riding several hot Internet trends -- utilizing the Ajax technology to make Web pages more interactive and relying on Google's advertising service to make money.
Well, basically it is a hosted wiki service, which ads Google AdSense to every page. Yawn. The fun part starts later in that SeattlePI article, and in the comments of the TechCrunch article.
In the SeattlePI article that WetPaint.com's press page suggested I read it says:
For those who remember the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, the concept of Wetpaint may sound all too familiar. After all, the idea of creating targeted communities was all the rage back then, with companies such as theGlobe.com, eCircles, Third Voice and eSociety jumping on the bandwagon.
"(Wetpaint) is dangerously close to some of the stuff we saw back in the irrational exuberance days of bubble version one," said O'Kelly, research director at the Burton Group.
Unlike Seattle-based Newsvine -- an online service that encourages citizen journalists to post stories and blog entries -- Wetpaint does not plan to share advertising revenue with contributors.
Wetpaint could bump up against plenty of competition. Yahoo!, MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal and others are creating online communities of passionate Internet users.
The comments on the TechCrunch post that WetPaint suggested I read are less reserved and less kind...
I prefer pbwiki.com... Up for months.
When last we heard from Wikisphere, they had just raised $5.25mm but continued to develop in almost-stealth mode. Ross said they were going to be consumer focused. Jeffrey had heard that it was going to be industry-focused. Well, today they pulled the
Hmmmm, I don’t see anything very nice here. It has an almost form-based look/feel to its interface. I agree that http://pbwiki.com is much nicer, more open. I also like http://www.stikipad.com quite a lot. It’s Rails-based, and yes it does allow inline uploading of files.
If it’s true, btw, that they raised $5.25m to build this application, I’m kinda blown away. I doubt there’s $100K invested in pbwiki and stikipad combined! How can this company be successful enough to provide a meaningful return on a standard vc investment
Looks really good, but thats all I can say about it … that it looks really good. I don’t see any addition in functionality, and its much slower to load than Wikipedia or the likes.
The application looks nice, but it somewhat looks as a rehash of MediaWiki with many improvements and/or “Web 2.0? elements in the interface...
Neato, a wiki. Yawn. $5 Mill?!? I bet the owners have nice cars now.
and even the techCrunch writer takes a beating:
Jotspot is head-and-shoulders above WetPaint, though a vastly more complex application. This is a pitiful puff piece; not representative I hope of your other work which I had thought was decent before this.
Hey, here's an idea. Maybe Google will buy it!
Note: I added the bolding. I edited some stuff that didn't add value, but not all of what didn't add value (lol)