PeanutButterWiki

PeanutButterWiki or PBwiki is a commercial wiki farm started by three graduates of Stanford University: David Weekly, Ramit Sethi, and Nathan Schmidt.

PBwiki's investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and the Seraph Group, as well as angel investors Ron Conway and Chris Yeh.

Software and features

PBwiki uses its own proprietary software and wiki syntax, both of which are under continuing development. It added WYSIWYG editing in early 2007, and semi-limited HTML source editing in 2008.

Users can create free basic wikis, or upgrade to a premium wiki to access additional features. Wikis can be public or private (only viewable by those who know the wiki password, or have been invited to join the wiki).

Premium wikis offer extra features, including enhanced security management with secure HTTP and multiple passwords, CSS support, the ability to hide some pages in an otherwise public wiki, and more generous space allowances.

Pros

One of the advantages of the PBwiki is its support of password protected private wikis. The software is quite easy to use. Also, there is no restriction on the number of users, number of pages, or revisions, even for free wikis.

Cons

The biggest drawback of PBwiki is the limited storage offered (only 10 MB) with free accounts. Upgrades can cost anywhere from $99.50/year to many thousands for enterprise deployments.

Historically, PBwiki focused on being simpler and easier-to-use than software wikis, but the company has been adding functionality, and recently launched a beta test of PBwiki 2.0, an improved version with a new layout, more granular security, and a more easily customizable color scheme.

History

The beta test of PBwiki was released for public comment on Tuesday, 31 May 2005.

Legend has it that David Weekly wrote the initial PBwiki implementation as part of one of his SuperHappyDevHouse hackathon events. At another SHDH event, Weekly created singlestat.us, the MySpace status watcher that enjoyed a brief week of fame before being shut down by MySpace.

The site was launched in June 2005, and within 48 hours, over 1000 wikis had been created. Today there are over 500,000 wikis and millions of pages of user-created content.

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