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When Google Code hosting first released, there was a mixed response. Many have been frustrated with sourceforge.net, so looked forward to the new hosting, but there were features missing.

It was good to see
Greg Stein announce a couple of important features that they just added:

File Downloads - this has been the most-requested feature since we launched project hosting here on Google Code. We knew it would be, but wanted to ship earlier rather than later. We think you'll like what we did... one-click downloads and scriptable uploads, as well as searchable summaries and labels.

Wikis - all projects now have a tightly-integrated wiki appearing under a new Wiki tab. The really cool thing here is that the content is stored in your Subversion repository under the /wiki/ directory. You can edit the pages with your favorite editor and commit them with your favorite Subversion client! Additionally, you can add labels and page summaries to wiki pages for improved searching.

Both are cool. The traditional thousand clicks to get a download has always been a pain on sf.net (especially if you want to wget the darn file to a remote server), and the idea of keeping the wiki content right there in your SVN to edit in a decent editor is cool too.

It was also interesting that they couldn't use one of the many wiki packages out there (MediaWiki, MoinMoin, XWiki, and the 300 others) but had to write their own due too:

Most of the existing wiki products cannot scale to the size and concurrency that we expect, so we had to design one to work to our demands, using Google's infrastructure. In addition, we believe that tools are most useful when they are easy to use and well integrated into the collaborative development environment. So, we are offering a simple wiki that works well with our existing tools. If you find that your project needs some highly specialized formatting, you can link to Google Page Creator, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Groups, or other pages hosted elsewhere on the Internet.