viki.wiki

A great way to attract users is to provide import functionality yourself.

By supporting import from other products, whether they have official export features or not, you make it easy for users to slide into your own version.

Even if your competitors don’t have an official export function, you can still help users out (and offend your competitors) by scraping data out of their system—writing custom tools to pull stuff out of their user interface and into your database.

The end result is the kind of frictionless world savvy users can only dream of—smoothly gliding from one app to another, taking advantage of new features without having to give up your old data.

And if the company making it gets bought and the developers who wrote all the new features quit and start a competitor, you can pull your data right back out again and zip over to the new app.

Which means more choice—and isn’t that ultimately best for everyone?

FedWiki is the next wiki-generation. It is a software that allows everybody to create individual wiki pages while circulating its content in a global - federated - environment.

It opens multiple paths for individual knowledge organization while demanding equal responsibility in creating a knowledge commons . This knowledge commons emerges out of thousands of wiki sites people freely contribute to.

Greedy folks (i.e. businesspeople) tend to be kind of short-sighted about this. “If I put big metal spikes in front of the exit,” they think, “my customers will never want to leave! My customer retention rates will go thru the roof.”

They decide to give a try and they have some big metal spikes installed in front of the exit. And, being the sober-minded realist businesspeople like to pretend they are, they measure customer retention rates before and after the metal spikes.