A Silicon Valley start-up aiming to catapult wikis into the mainstream and transform the editable Web sites into an application development platform has attracted a flood of interest for its product beta.

Nearly 3,000 companies, small and large, have signed up for free beta test accounts with JotSpot of Palo Alto, Calif. "A lot more than we expected, it shows there is a real interest in the category," said Joe Kraus, CEO of the company, which operated under the radar until its official launch three weeks ago.

Wiki is a term derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and describes Web sites that can be accessed and changed using a simple browser-based user interface. Especially popular among tech-savvy people, probably the most visible wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by thousands of people.

JotSpot seeks to make wikis more accessible by adding a "what you see is what you get" editor that even novice users should be able to work with. Additionally, to make wikis more useful as a collaboration tool, JotSpot gives each wiki page that it hosts an e-mail address, allowing users to add an archive of e-mail messages to pages.

Along with its efforts to make wikis more useful and user-friendly, JotSpot is turning wikis into Web-based applications for tasks such as lightweight project management, trouble ticketing and recruiting. The company offers several pre-built applications that users can change, just like wiki pages can be changed.

"We looked at the wiki space and thought it was kind of like the Internet in 1993, what I would call the land of the nerds, useful, but for a limited crowd. We think that wikis are useful to a much broader audience," Kraus said. Also, wikis should not only be about documents, but also about applications, he said.

Though JotSpot is still in its early days, with a growing need for collaboration tools the expanded wikis could ultimately rival collaboration products from giants including IBM and Microsoft, said Burton Group Senior Analyst Peter O'Kelly.

"JotSpot will be used within organizations and it will displace other collaborative product offerings in places. Ultimately it is going to be competition with the more established players such as IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint and to a certain extent could even compete with the content and document management vendors," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.