Wix turns everybody into a flash publicist

Flash-publishing tool Sprout has a new competitor, and a it’s pretty tough one. Israeli-based Wix doesn’t just makes widgets, but also complete sites. People who are web-savvy enough to maintain a Flickr and YouTube account, but find it too complicated to build a fancy flash site, should definitely read this post.

Co-Founders Giora Kaplan, Avishai Abrahami, and Nadav Abrahami launched their service in open beta at the end of last June, saying that it’s “a big step forward in our journey to change the way web content is created”. I’m not sure whether this is a little bit too enthusiastic, yet I do think Wix can help starting web publishers to shape their online identity.

Thanks to a drag ‘n drop interface, users can create three sorts of Wix publications: the WixSite (1), a Flash-based website that uses an XML file to make it Google-friendly. ExtraSpace (2), a flash widget that allows you to spice up your MySpace page. The third option is WixComment, a fancy widget that functions like an embeddable bio on social network pages. There are several templates available, categorized under Business, Art, Personal, Music, Designers, and MySpace.

To give you an example of how Wix can be used: my grandparents have just celebrated 50 years of marriage and also bought a computer. I can browse to Wix, open the Personal category, select the family tree option and start building a really good-looking genealogy tool for them. Best of all, it will cost me absolutely nothing – except some time.