TWiki - Good Marketing, strong brand, poor product development, no community

Management Summary

TWiki.net is successful and has compelling language in its marketing materials. The organization jazzed up its website, has participated in several wiki competitions, and are mentioned in blog posts on wikis. For the uninitiated, TWiki.org and TWiki.net are controlled by the same organization. While TWiki.org is the "open source" face of TWiki.net, TWiki.net is siginificantly a marketing arm of TWiki.net, funneling sales leads from the former to the latter.

I am writing this article not as a rant against TWiki, but in the interest of all those who consider TWiki as their enterprise wiki and want to compare it with Foswiki. As this is the official Foswiki weblog, there will be a bias for Foswiki. Nevertheless, I have tried an even-handed approach to the material below, attempting to keep any "spin" to a minimum. Here are my theses that I will lay out in detail later:

1. Twiki.net is good at marketing. But their marketing won't buy you the love for the product from your employees. It converts into nothing you need in your company.
2. But TWiki has modest product development underway and little active community. But these attributes are what you need as a customer. You need a slick product. You need developers who enhance your solution with plugins and innovate. And a product needs an active and living community to foster its development.
3. Foswiki has a strong product development and a strong community. That is important for you as a customer. In TWiki there is no strong community left.

Video Trailer for this blog post:

The details

I will now address the areas "Community", "Product development" and "Marketing" in more detail:

Community

Although it might not evident at first sight, the people behind a product are most important for the success of the product in the long run. There is no product development and no innovation without a community.

For TWiki

The leftovers at TWiki.net are Peter Thoeny and his employees. There is little community activity to be seen, unfortunately. It would also be cool for TWiki.net to have an active community instead of what we see now. If Twiki does not change the lack of community soon, it will simply die from inactivity in product development eventually. If you look at the download page of the open source product TWiki you will see 13 links to the "commercial owner" TWiki.net. Before you can download you are requested to fill out a form. And the form contents go to where? To TWiki.net. This is not the environment for professional consultants. This is a way to ensure no professional community evolves.

The Foswiki community is strong and an independent association was just founded

The people who developed TWiki during the last 10 years have moved to Foswiki. These people have founded a democratic and fully-independent Foswiki association Foswiki community members report the wiki development is now fun again. And that's what makes projects like Foswiki thrive. A good, active, and living community is the basis of every successful open source project.

Product development

TWiki development

TWiki.net seems to have concentrated on marketing and left the development up to Foswiki. TWiki.net can incorporate Foswiki code in their software quite easily as both applications share the same code base. All that might be new and probably developed by Peter Thoeny is proprietory and for sale. I have my doubts that this practice of depriving the community of new features is compliant with the GPL. That might also be simple ignorance. But all these exclusive "features" cannot be seen and assessed. To date, I have not seen a video or a screenshot or a thorough description of these "exclusive" features. You should be very cautious if things are only promised but not shown.

Back to community development. To my knowledge, there is not a single feature in TWiki that would not have been available in Foswiki before. And I am watching TWiki pretty closely.

Foswiki development

Within 11 months since the TWiki fork Foswiki was created, we saw more than 5000 code checkins from developers. A lot of new plugins have been made available to extend your user experience. I want to point to three of them:

1. Topic Permission Plugin and the Section Permission Plugin for the rights management of individual pages
2. Autosave-Plugin, so you don't loose data any more, when your browser crashes
3. Innovation-Management-Plugin to give your employees certain amount of points to vote on business ideas within your company.

These are just three of numerous examples that they really rock in my opinion.

Foswiki has fixed 400 bugs that are still unresolved in TWiki. Did you know that?

Marketing

TWiki

The good side: Successful Marketing results, Mentioned in blog posts, Participant in award competitions, Nice website of www.twiki.net, Professionally produced videos.

The basis of this success: It is based on a strong brand, that was created also by Foswiki members over ten years. Please allow some grief from these people, when now all this brand value goes to TWiki.net. The succes is also based on the well-known TWiki.net leader and his good marketing skills: congratulations for those achievements!

And this good performance is also good for Foswiki. There is no doubt. Please keep up the good work.

The bad side of TWiki marketing: The communication is not open to customers. There is no hint of Foswiki anywhere. TWiki.net staff talk badly about Foswiki in direct communication with customers. I was disappointed when I heard from former TWiki.net-customers who now work with my company what the TWiki.net staff say about Foswiki. Unfortunately it is not based on facts and creates fear. TWiki.net staff have threatened multiple Foswiki community members including me with legal issues. I want this bad side of TWiki marketing to vanish.

Foswiki

The good side of Foswiki marketing: We have a shared and balanced approach. People who rant like me are present. But there are also a lot of people who are calm and reasonable. We have people who write a lot. But we als have people who create videos and talk a lot.

The bad side of Foswiki marketing: We have a brand that is as strong as TWiki yet. We have been kicked out of Wikipedia for not being notable yet. What a shame! There are no full-time employees.

What all this means for you

• You can't buy anything with good marketing from a TWiki.net product.
• You have to focus on the product itself and on the community developing it.
• Your employees will only love you for a good product. They do not care about unfulfilled promises and fluff.

Foswiki is an open source wiki that rocks. If I am asked what to choose if you are searching for a true open source wiki, I highly recommend Foswiki as an open source enterprise wiki.

Disclaimer: This blog post only reflects the view of Martin Seibert as an individual. It is not an official statement of the Foswiki community and it might not represent all opinions. Additionally, as I have been kicked out of the TWiki-community like all other members last year, I might have missed certain details. I am happy for you to add them through the commenting feature below.