So on Friday not one but two long awaited beta service invitations arrived. The first was the announcement of the addition of Jotspot to Google Apps (finally) and the other about the Amazon Simple DB service. Typical buses…
I didn’t have a lot of time this weekend so I plumped for signing up for Google Apps and trying the new wiki functionality as I was hoping for a beefed up version of Pages. The Simple DB service also needs me to beef up my Web Service scripting fu.
It is too early to say much about either service but after signing up for a Google Apps account (apparently you cannot simply drive one off your regular Google Account). I was slightly underwhelmed by the new Google Sites service. It has taken how long to make a basic and acceptable wiki service available?
Still you can have a lot of separate wiki sites and you have a lot of flexibility on how you share and collaborate on them so maybe I need to build up some content first and then try to share it around. I would like to know whether you can hook Analytics up to some Sites content. That would be useful for some of the content that otherwise would go on something like a WordPress page.
Echo One 
Underwhelmed is the word. To answer your question it has taken Google 16 months since it purchased JotSpot. JotSpot had an excellent feature list. Not as strong as SocialText but not as complicated to use (or as pricy). More features than say, PBWiki, but also a bit harder to use. A good mid-level wiki.
Google Sites is like JotSpot but without all the good parts. It is very basic. Easy to use but very limited functionality. In the 16 months, Wetpaint, PBWiki, Central Desktop, etc. have all advanced, and Google has gone backwards.