Wetpaint Offering Free Private Wikis and Other New Features

Wetpaint, the innovative and easy-to-use Wiki service, has today unveiled an exciting new feature for its users, completely free of charge. Starting today, users will have the ability to create free private wiki websites. The new private Wetpaint Wikis are invitation-only online communities viewable and editable only by those people who the creators invite. Once users are given access to a private Wetpaint wiki, they can easily communicate, collaborate, interact, and share information, music, videos, calendars, poles, files, and more with the other members who have been approved.

This has been one the most requested features since Wetpaint was released. Many users wanted the ability to be able to collaborate with their community, while also avoiding some of the downfalls that public wikis have, such as unverified content and anonymous posting. “Fundamentally, wikis are about openness, dialogue, and interaction. However, there are any number of situations where those things need to happen privately,” said Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint.

Wetpaint has also done it's best to make it a straightforward process to make a wiki private. Getting a new private Wetpaint Wiki is taken care of during your Wiki setup. New users are asked “Who can view your Wetpaint Wiki?” and then they must simply select the “Invited members” option. Existing public Wetpaint Wikis can just as easily be converted to private Wikis by changing the same option in the site settings area for registered users.

Wetpaint claims that the all-new private wikis are ideal for families, class projects, and clubs. Anyone who wants to build collaborative websites to share with a select group of individuals will be able to make use of them. Wiki owners will be able to give their communities the best of social networking, blogs, web publishing, and privacy.

In addition to free private Wetpaint wikis, the service is also announcing the availability of YouTube Video and Yahoo! Images search services, and a "Top Contributor" avatar cloud. The new search options will help with productivity on Wetpaint wikis by making it easier for users to find and upload new videos and images, all without ever having to leave their wiki, as shown in the screenshot. The Top Contributor avatar cloud, similar to the now commonplace keyword tag clouds, will display the profile photos of users who are making contributions to the site.

It seems like Wetpaint is really listening to what its users want and giving them just that. One of the most important jobs for web services is to maintain their user base, and Wetpaint should have no problem with this because they are giving the community exactly what they want.

For more information be sure to visit Wetpaint. If you have thoughts or ideas for the service's future, be sure to let Wetpaint know, by leaving feedback, and you can rest assured that they are actually taking those into consideration. After all, they didn't make Time Magazine's 50 Best Websites of 2007 list for no reason.