Dan Bricklin, the man that gave us VisiCalc, the father of all spreadsheets, just launched his new product, WikiCalc. [via Dave Winer and David Weinberger]

It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit ability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet.

I think it’s a brilliant move to embed the functionalities of spreadsheets in a wiki environment. It’s much more intriguing than just a web based implementation of Excel like ThinkFree. As posted in a previous post the only other worth mentioning player in this arena is NumSum: basic spreadsheet functionalities, but nice “social” features.

WikiCalc is written in Perl and it will be available only as a multi platform download. But I hope this is just the beginning of Dan project and I’m eager to see WikiCalc evolve from a standalone piece of software to a seamlessly integrated component of many wiki platforms and services.

It could be a huge success.