Near-Time too mashes Wiki+Widgets

By Vivek | September 26th, 2007 at 07:16 pm ET         

Near-Time, the Durham, NC based collaboration startup is following the expected feature upgrade path. The on-demand wiki startup is now supporting adding of widgets from 30 widget providers. Most of you can very well guess who all is in the list - Google Calendar, 30Boxes, Upcoming, meebo, Wufoo, icebergg, Google Maps, Youtube, Polldaddy,…..and more - the typical widget crowd that most of us have gotten used to using where we want.

As I noted in the title, Near-time is not really the first startup to do that. CentralDesktop already supports selected external apps, Wetpaint enabled widget support long time back, Mindtouch did it’s widget enabled release last month, Atlassian has a petty good plugin support, pbWIki also enables widgets,…….

However, as compared to Mindtouch, CentralDesktop, and others, Near-Time widget support is more in the form of dropping the embed code onto your pages. Which means lesser control over what content users are adding that in turn makes it less attractive of an option for business users. Since business users are the main target the startup is going after, their team really needs to build deep integration with a small-selected external widget providers.