Wikispaces is three this month, and we’ve shared some statistics about growth and traffic over on our blog:

http://blog.wikispaces.com/2008/03/wikispaces-turns-three.html

The short version: 920K users, 390K wikis. 26M pageviews last month, 200M last year. Woo!

It’s exciting times at our little company: we’re growing like crazy, hiring, and generally having a great time. Know a great developer or two? Send them our way!

As regular readers of this irregularly-updated blog will note, I’ve been hard at work the last two and a half years on Wikispaces alongside Adam and Dom. We set out to start a company that builds useful products for real people, and we wanted to grow the company on our terms. We found a small office with lots of character south-of-Market in San Francisco, scavenged a few desks from Craigslist, and got to work bringing easy-to-use wikis to hundreds of thousands of individuals, K-12 teachers, clubs, non-profits, universities, and businesses. Along the way, we didn’t take millions of dollars of venture funding or chase ephemeral web 2.0 trends — instead we tried hard to keep our eye on the ball: running a great service, listening to our members, and building a real business.

We’re now fortunate to be in a position where we’re profitable, growing fast, and hiring. We’ve got a big opportunity ahead of us and a lot of work to do, especially in developing our service and getting the word out.

If you’re a sharp software engineer or savvy marketer - or know someone who is - we want to talk to you. Read more about the positions here:

http://tangient.com/jobs.html

Want to know more? Drop me an email or give me a call anytime.

Yesterday, our team over at Wikispaces was thrilled to announce that every SourceForge.net project now comes with a Wikispaces wiki. We think every open source project can benefit from having a shared space to collaborate on documents - what better way than a wiki? Our work with SourceForge also shows off a lot of the integration and platform work that’s gone into Wikispaces under the hood. Some of this work has been available for a while, for example full HTML and CSS customization available through our theme system. Other features - mostly around the nitty gritty integration points of authentication, authorization, and custom application hooks - we’ll be talking about more in the near future. As always, keep an eye on the Wikispaces blog for the full scoop.

If you’re a SourceForge project admin, head over to your admin section now and enable your wiki!

Yesterday, Brad Fitzpatrick and SixApart hosted the second MogileFS Summit at SixApart’s offices in San Francisco. The initial response on the mailing list suggested a handful of local users would attend, but in the end more than twenty people showed up from a wide range of companies. In addition to a few folks from Danga / SixApart, there was a small group from Guba, two guys from Bloglines, Matt from Wordpress, and developers from lots of other sites both large (in some cases, massive) and small.

MogileFS, for the unanointed, is a specialized distributed filesystem originally built to power LiveJournal. Like its siblings memcached and perlbal, Mogile is open source software. True distributed filesystems are unweildy and complex; Mogile makes a number of assumptions and simplifications that make it easy to deploy, fast, and developer-friendly. Mogile doesn’t mount like a traditional UNIX filesystem (though in the summit, we saw a demo of a FUSE+webdav mount hack) and stores files based on a flat domain / key structure. It’s up to the application using Mogile to add files via a simple API, enforce permissions, map keys to filenames if needed, and query for and cache the locations of stored files. Where Mogile shines is replicating files across pools of cheap, usually non-RAID disk arrays and handling drive and device failures, some level of capacity balancing, and future growth. Mogile really nails a sweet spot for the kind of storage problems many websites face. At Wikispaces, we’ve got millions of files in Mogile and it has been rock-solid since day one.

We spent the majority of the summit talking about what’s coming in Mogile 2 - which is already partially running in production for LiveJournal - and what’s on people’s minds for future releases. Aside from a number of code cleanup and performance enhancements, big changes in Mogile 2 include a new plugin architecture and pluggable replication rules. In Mogile 1.x, replication was controlled by a “mindevcount” setting, the minimum number of devices that a file had to be stored on. In Mogile 2, you can write a replication ruleset that mandates files span racks, datacenters, a certain number of fast systems, etc. Best of all, Mogile 2 is API-compatible with Mogile 1.x, so we can drop it in on the fly.

To Brad, Junior, and everyone from SixApart who’s hacking on Mogile, memcached, and friends - thanks! It was an awesome summit.

I’ve been quiet lately here in blogland, but I’ve got two great excuses: the summer sailing season in San Francisco and all the things we’ve been working on at Wikispaces.

Today we’re thrilled to announce a program to give away 100,000 wikis (usually $5/month) for use in K-12 education. For free. No strings attached.

We’re doing this after hearing amazing stories of teachers trying wikis in their classrooms over the last year. There’s a huge demand for simple technology in education, not bloated and complex software that scares away teachers and students alike. Better still, we don’t want to put price pressure on educators - too many teachers already have to make impossible choices about the tools they can afford to bring into their classrooms.

For a small company, 100,000 is a big number - and we need your help. Help in telling teachers, journalists, school staff, and educational technologists about what we’re trying to do. Email them our blog post, post one of our progress trackers on your blog or website (like the thermometer to the right of this post), or just share our story with a friend. With any luck, we’ll look back at 100,000 as just the beginning.

This past Christmas, I was lucky to get a BlackBerry 7105t under the tree. This was, I thought, a great phone. Nice and small, good bright screen, and a well-designed address book with Outlook syncing. SureType is nothing short of magic and email via a cheap T-Mobile account worked pretty well.

Four months later, the 7105t met a watery grave at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay after a nighttime sailing mishap. I got sad. Then I got an 8700g.

Now I understand crackberry addiction. The full keyboard is a big part - SureType is very good, but just doesn’t compare. Whatever Intel xScale processor they crammed into this thing is fast, far faster than the 7105t. Web pages scream via EDGE and T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan price is right - $19 a month. But with both the 7105t and 8700g I struggled to figure out what apps I needed to get, what my best option was for setting up email forwarding, and what tricks I could use to be more productive. I read forums, I read blogs, I scoured search engines, and I came up with only a few answers.

What’s still missing on the web is a great reference site for all things BlackBerry. BlackBerry Forums is the closest thing - a great discussion site, but reference information is lost in a sea of comments and sticky posts.

So I’ve started a wiki over at Wikispaces to gather links, pictures, tips, and anything else BlackBerry users deem important in one easy-to-edit spot.

Got a BlackBerry? Join in.

This week over at Wikispaces we launched support for embedded media. This means you can put YouTube videos, Google Calendars, Odeo podcasts, Flickr slideshows, and just about anything else you can imagine in your wiki page.

Now you might be thinking: “well, duh - I can do that with any wiki that supports HTML.” But we chose to do embedded media in a smarter way.

If you’re just pasting HTML in your wiki page, you’ll see something like this when editing your page:

<embed
style=”width:400px; height:326px;”
id=”VideoPlayback”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8224040487342942414″>

Not so pretty, and really confusing for other people who might be editing your page. Put ten of these on a page, and you’ve got a real mess.

Here’s what the same embed looks like on Wikispaces:

[[media type=”google” key=”-8224040487342942414″]]

YouTube?

[[media type=”youtube” key=”UnFV-fvgOu0″]]

Nice and clean. Paste in a URL instead of the embedded HTML code and we’ll convert it automatically into the correct tag. Paste in something we don’t yet understand and we’ll add it to our database for the future.

Long-time Wikispaces user Sean FitzGerald has a great demo page showing what happens when you unleash media on wiki pages. Awesome!