Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

I received the following email asking about Webnote:

Thanks for the post-it technology - I was wondering if you knew of any sites that are using web-based post-its as part of their user-experience (in other words: they are using either your or their own post-it technology as a way of note taking on their site)?

My reply was:

Based on referer logs, I’ve checked out sites that provide a lot of hits. They’re mostly blogs that have a link in their sidebar to their workspace. The workspace itself is used mainly as a type of guestbook/bulletin board where people write little notes to each other. I know of one church that started using it as a message board for upcoming events and encouraged anyone to add events. Another workspace is being used in what appears to be the coordination of a softball team (one note has the next game time, another the current roster, and another note is used to vote on a team outing).

I didn’t expect webnote to be used that way. I originally made webnote because I find it beneficial to move around ideas and to group them together (in this case, by color or spatially). In reality, I think most people use it in place of a wiki or a message board because it’s easier to use. There’s less effort in editing a note or creating a new note than editing or creating a new wiki page.

That isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of people who use it to keep notes. It’s just that for most users, color and positioning or stacking of notes doesn’t have significance.

I think the moral of this story is that wiki’s are hard to use. More thoughts on this tomorrow.