SAN FRANCISCO: Pioneering US technology firm JotSpot launched new internet application software for the masses on Monday that it billed as a leap forward in the evolution of the way people share and edit websites.

JotSpot 2.0 is a ‘wiki’ computer application that enables people to make joint calendars, spreadsheets, photo galleries and virtual filing cabinets, said company founder Joe Kraus.

The term ‘wiki’ was inspired by the Hawaiian ‘wiki-wiki’, which translates into ‘very quick’, and is used in internet parlance to a site that allows visitors to make changes to content, with the popular online Wikipedia encyclopaedia the seminal example.

“The most powerful revolutions in technology in general have been do-it-yourself revolutions,” Kraus told AFP.

Kraus cited the societal embrace of desktop computers, then self-publishing, and Podcasting, which he described as do-it-yourself radio.

“There is a new revolution — allowing a space online where someone can essentially build an application and do something.”

Wikis have been an increasingly popular venue for cyber-collaboration focused mainly on documents or other texts built by visitor input.

The JotSpot application was crafted to let online visitors go past just writing to actually working together on tasks as if they were in a conference room or at the same computer, Kraus said.—AFP