I had an amazing idea for the next generation of Wikis. PBWorks (previously known as PBWiki) is the first really usable in the real world wiki service that is as easy as PB&J sandwiches and today released their ‘Project Edition’ which focuses on milestones, goals, and task management, however is still a wiki. What about when the wiki market has reached saturation and something new needs to happen, like a graphical wiki (“giki”?, “g-wiki”?). But what does that actually mean?
I came across this thought when investigating office collaboration and how amazingly wikis work, we’ve seen that (corporate wikis, PBWorks, Wikipedia), but what about those situations where a group is working on a project/document that is includes graphics, specialized fonts and layouts (like Publisher documents, for example, or a PDF). Te problem is that wikis work well for mostly unformatted text, but what about a wiki that would allow a user to create a template in Publisher or in itself and allow the wiki content to be mapped to it.
A good possible UI could be borrowed from Google Books, a mostly Javascript based interface that allows the user to toss pages around, uses AJAX to dynamically load pages as they’re called, and provides text search and indexing that is just plain cool. What if this could work in a wiki? This could be somewhat easily done by just mapping content from sections of a wiki onto a page, or using some voodoo software it’s possible that the user could change the text in a WYSIWYG style editor.
I’m just proposing something that would be SO cool, and would definitely create sales and encourage those not using wikis for the reason of not being able to have pretty, Word or Publisher layouts of their content. From what I’ve seen from PBWorks, this is definitely possible for them.