• by Laura Weinert , December 29, 2006

First they snatched up Blogger, then Writely. They launched Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Apps for Your Domain. Now Google has grabbed online-collaboration-tools pioneer JotSpot. It appears the folks at Google are well on the way to building the powerhouse business collaboration suite of their dreams.

JotSpot’s wiki software — made popular by online encyclopedia Wikipedia — allows users to collaboratively create, edit, and update rich Web-based spreadsheets, calendars, documents, and photo galleries without knowing html. Some 30,000 paying users and 2,000 companies have been using JotSpot to manage projects, build intranets, share files, and stay in sync with colleagues and customers.

“It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage, and share information online,” said JotSpot CEO Joe Kraus. “When we had conversations with people at Google, we found ourselves completing each other’s sentences.