Google Sidewiki - Making all websites social

Sidewiki Turning the web into a kindergarten  playground

Sidewiki  - Commenting on webs sites:
This week Google released an addition to their tool bar called Sidewiki. This allows people with a Google account to write comments about any site. Anyone with Google's tool bar and the Sidewiki plugin, can view  comments left by others. People with this add-on can post and read comments about any web page on a web site. Turning the websites into mini blogs for those who want to talk about what has been posted.

I took a quick jaunt around some sites: Glenbeck, RushLimbaugh, Obama.com, algore.com, fool.com,  perezhilton, huffingtonpost, politco, nytimes, foxnews, latimes, washintonpost, wsj and drudgereport (I picked popular, political or controversial sites figuring they are more likely to make people want to comment.) Drudge had the most comments, but they had devolved into a kindergarten shouting match of "You Stink", "Do Not", "Do To".

This is not a Surprise:
A few days before YouTube (Google) announced that their star rating system does not work. To be accurate, they said that most people rate a video when they like it (giving it 5 stars) compared to any other rating. This seems likely to carry over into Sidewiki. Those people who want to take the time to write a comment about a site (or web page on a site) are going to be those with strong opinions about the topic.

Do I think Sidewiki is going to be popular? Maybe for a few people, on a few sites, but I don't think it will take off like twitter or facebook.

Most web sites do not inspire much emotion, and therefore many people will not be motivated to post (or even read) comments. Those sites which do inspire that emotion, I fear, will have comments similar to that of the Drudge report.

For Webmasters:
Google has also given webmasters the ability to create their own comments for on a web page. These comments will be displayed above all other comments and highlighted in green.

What other issues are there:
There is the "Report Abuse" link with each post, but I wonder what happens when that link is clicked. Google says they will review the post to see if it meets the Terms of Use. What if someone claims it is slanderous? What then will Google take it down? Is there a more defined review policy? Can someone, or Google,  be sued over a sidewiki post?

Some of the sites had comments that were no more than commercials for other products. Not quite the ideal expressed by Google, were people can express their insights. (I'm cynical, soon I expect half the comments to be links to adult friend finders. But that is just my thoughts.)


If you want to spend some time and walk on the bleeding edge, then download Sidewiki and take it for a spin. Visit some of your favorite sites and see what others have to say. You could even check out my comment on this blog.

As a side note, as of today Sidewiki can not distinguish between related URLs. Visit www.drudgereport.com and there will be several comments, but if you go to drudgereport.com there are none.