Happy New Year!
Very Best New Year Wishes! 2007 has came and its time to wish everything best to all Wikidot Users and Friends!
Always sometime around December/January there is a time to summarize the last year and make a few predictions/resolutions/plans for the new year. So it is this time. It is also the first New Year holiday for Wikidot (yes, it is only 5 months old now!) and please let me tell a few words about what happened last year and what will (probably) happen in 2007.
What happened in 2006
HOW IT STARTED
Without any doubts it has been a very important year for Wikidot. Not only the whole idea of Wikidot matured in January 2006 but around April 2006 the serious development started. At the time I took 6-month long holiday from the Institute where I was supposed to complete my PhD in astrophysics. Without any other obligations I could concentrate on the project and (after a lot of hard work) in August 2006 the first version of the service was opened to the public.
Almost immediately Wikidot was positively accepted by its first users. Well, I was trying hard to make Wikidot something unique and worth using and apparently this has been achieved.
THX TO THE COMMUNITY
At this point I would like to thank to the Users Community — for great discussions, tracing bugs, suggesting improvements, helping with decisions, and — most importantly — for using Wikidot! Wikidot is about building communities so I am very happy that many of you found Wikidot a good and useful service to use!
WHERE ARE WE NOW
Now we have over 6000 registered users, average 2000 page edits daily, 80 new users daily, 5000 unique visitors daily and almost 100 000 monthly, 50 000 daily pageviews (values for December 2006). And the numbers grow quite nicely.
Wikidot (and me) appeared twice in local (Toruń, Poland) newspapers as a front-page story. It was really nice and helped me a lot when organizing things around here ("oh, so you are this young person from the newspaper…").
At this point a short notice: Wikidot has been created and maintained by one person (me!) so far. Hopefully this will change in 2007 ;-)
BTW: I have decided not to continue my PhD work ;-)
What will (likely) happen in 2007
SUCCESS OR FAILURE?
A few Wikidot Users have asked me about the future of Wikidot since they were not sure if it is safe to use it in a longer perspective. Does it have a chance to succeed?
Wikidot is growing really nicely — with the number of users, created wikis/pages and the number of features — it already is a sucessfull project and now I am pretty sure it would be difficult not to make it even more successful.
FINANCIAL BACKBONE
In 2007 I will certainly keep working on features, improvements and all the technical stuff. But 2007 will also be a year to start offering "premium" features (such as SSL access, extra file storage etc.) and turning Wikidot into a business. Wikidot is growing and will need a new server, disk storage, bandwidth etc. The financial backbone for the project is crucial for its development since it can guarantee the solid base for it.
ADVERTISEMENTS
Of course all the Wikis will stay free as they are now! But (most probably) you will notice small, context-based text ads that will be showing on some wiki pages, as Wikidot will be (as stated in Terms of Use and stressed in a few other places from the very beginning) mostly supported by advertisements. For these who do not want ads on their pages — there will be a small fee (a few $$ monthly) to remove them. Non-profit organizations, education, open-source related projects will be able to remove ads for free. There will be also ways for "power users" to monetize their own Wikis.
OPEN-SOURCING
Around March/April 2007 a great event will take place: the whole software that powers Wikidot.com will be released as open-source (and free) software that anyone will be able to install on his/her own server. How will it affect Wikidot.com? I am hoping to get more people interested in Wikidot in general and encourage them to write extensions, plugins, themes… in a similar way that developers are working and improving WordPress. The simple plan for the Wikidot is to become a recognized solution for wikis as WordPress is for blogs. This would also be a very important step towards entering the enterprise market.
2007 — A VERY IMPORTANT YEAR
Of course you should stay tuned for new cool features available next year! And I can promise you they will be fascinating. Some of them are already on my development server and are being tested now.
So will 2007 be a hard year for Wikidot? Certainly it will be very important. And it means a lot of work for me and my future coworkers. But I am sure there are great times ahead! I am really glad to be a part of it. And I hope you will enjoy it too!
best wishes
Michał Frąckowiak