When positioning TamTam in today's diverse world of WikiWiki clones and implementations one has to evaluate several different aspects some of which are measurable and technical, some more subjective and context related.
The concept of bi-directional linking and one-click page creation came fairly late into the limelight of web development compared to the phenomena of news-logs (started by Slashdot and it's later clones) and Blogs (initiated by radio Userland and Blogger). Only in last year and a half wider open source community realized the benefits of this not so new concept. Therefore a good deal of applications adopted the concept through established plug-in systems and introduced new "wiki feature" as new addition to the already existing set of features (Slashcode and PostNuke have been one of the most prominent)! This way users usually don't take the full advantage of the new feature as they are still occupied by the previous concepts and metaphors of the systems. For this reason they are less innovative and interesting in terms of encouraging web development based on new concepts.
On the other hand in the world of WikiWiki clones situation is much more complex. One of the most advanced and certainly most mature clones is TWiki, with it's more advanced (forked) version MegaTWiki and less advanced counterpart MeatBall Wiki - are all Perl based solutions. TWiki's features are very advanced in areas relevant to knowledge mapping and writing technical documentation. It's "weaknesses" are very basic creative design possibilities and fairly slow and conservative development (which is sometimes benefit for technical users) in terms of using new technologies and standards while trying to keep the compatibility with most ancient standards (text-only web browsers). Therefore TWiki is mostly used by software developers and it's most advanced features (meta data, form-based variables and page based content subscription) is irrelevant to the wiki beginners and web designers who appreciate their freedom! In the PHP based group of Wiki clones SFWiki, phpWiki and few others have showed fast progress early on (approx. 2 years ago) due to a higher speed of development with PHP, but have fail to sustain and develop into maturity, offering nothing but most basic wiki functionality. However recently a new comer in the field TikiWiki has showed a very high level of development vitality and enthusiasm, so it has managed to develop a very stable and most feature-full web application (with a lot of CMS features) in a half a year. It is well documented and fairly easy to use as it supports both traditional web-page creation, Wiki page authoring and hybrid template-based modes. Since it is developed mostly by South American developers it is trying to provide support for translation into other languages (unlike most US based developers). Mailing lists are helpful resource for newcomers and opened for suggestions (wish lists are instantly discussed). In current state they are easily recognized as most prosperous of all and keep expanding their developers base. Only technical drawbacks are in their approach is that their platform is MySQL and PHP which makes it hard for them to move into non web services and add features/complexity without making a system significantly slower. Third group in Wiki clones are Python based, pyWiki, Moin-Moin and TamTam. With first two developers were mainly re-implementing the original WikiWiki features and have therefore stayed within scope of developers community. Compared to these TamTam has taken on the most adventurous path of abandoning Apache webserver and database, as underplaying technology for it's application and using newly developed and advanced Twisted Matrix framework. Although this sounds like just another technical innovation, it's most important benefits are actually in the fact that TamTam will be able to work efficiently in as web service on existing web servers, as integrated self-sufficient server application and most importantly as client application. With this feature users will not be locked into developing/using content exclusively when on-line, but also when off-line (which is currently possible with other wikies only if you install the full web server, database and additional application). On the other side although currently similar to Moin-Moin, TamTam is moving into design friendly concepts with systems of widgets and templates which are similar to the ones of TikiWiki (templates and imbedded objects with CSS styles). The flexibility of this system is already visible in early implementations of websites hosted @mi2 (http://tamtam.mi2.hr/). TamTam is also integrating multimedia (streaming media) features (currently implementing mp3 streaming feature). Further development of TamTam is (unlike other clones) is opened to adopting vector based graphic interfaces like Flash or 3D (through open source application Blender), which might lead to more human centric perception of data (using shapes, colors and sonic information). Although there are few more Wiki clones based on different programing languages (Java, hypercard, C++ or other) their features are very limited and don't have strong support of developers or wider user base. Exception from this is perl-based system of Everything2 which although is not Wiki system as such, is using the same concepts and has developted over the years into one of the biggest on-line communities and is a good example of succesfull collaborative environment which is based on sofisticated peer reviewing and moderation. However it is also specialised and complex tool for smaller projects that can't use most of it's benefits.
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