Google made another one of those moves last week aimed at breathing down the neck of Microsoft when it bought JotSpot, a 27-man two-year-old Palo Alto, California wiki-based application creation and hosting outfit headed up by CEO Joe Kraus (pictured) and Graham Spencer.

Something that the acquisition itself notices in a FAQ on its site is a "strong fit" with existing Google products like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google's recent co-mingling of Writely, which it bought from Upstartle, and in-house-developed Spreadsheets, Google Apps for Your Domain and Google Groups.

Unlike the $1.65 billion-in-stock YouTube, no price was given.

Apparently the wiki was a developmental accident, an in-house tool that JotSpot's founders CEO Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, who also co-founded Excite.com, the search engine, created on the way to building an entirely different company until they realized they might have something to sell in the wiki, which now lets people create spreadsheets, calendars, documents and photo galleries with e-mail integration, all without knowing HTML.

It claims "thousands" of business users, including eBay, and 30,000 paying customers. There are also a reported 300,000 free users, privy to a restricted number of pages and size of group.

Nobody except existing users can access the wiki right now because it's been taken out of circulation until it's migrated to and integrated with Google's systems. It's also discontinuing a JotSpot Wiki Server beta but its JotBox appliance will evidently still be supported.

And apparently it's going to be completely free under Google's administration. JotSpot says it will no longer bill customers for the privilege of using the service. It previously charged $5-$200 a month to host people's wikis. Whether JotSpot users will have to use Google IDs like Writely is unclear.



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