Google Sidewiki Brings Discussion To Every Website

Google Sidewiki dropped last week and hasn’t actually sparked much discussion from what I can see. It allows you to read and leave comments on any website you visit. It’s an interesting concept and could be very useful, but there are some implications here.

How It Works

Google Sidewiki works via the Google Toolbar. This means that it doesn’t (yet) work in Google’s own Chrome browser. To activate Sidewiki, you’ll need to have enable enhanced features in Google Toolbar, which also allows the toolbar to send information back to Google about your browsing. When you visit a website with Sidewiki information, you’ll see an indicator on the page that opens a new window with the comment stream. The comments don’t appear on the page or in an actual sidebar of the page itself.

Sidewiki uses your Google Profile rank (you have one, don’t you?) as part of the equation to figure out if your comment is relevant. There is also a built-in ranking system so that users can specify whether a comment was helpful or not.

How It’s Been Done Before

The instant I saw Sidewiki, I thought of the social bookmarking site Diigo. It’s actually my bookmarking service of choice because of it’s many features, one of those being sticky notes. With sticky notes, you can leave a note on any website. It shows up as a speech bubble in whatever location you choose and holds an entire conversation thread. Any other users with the Diigo Toolbar installed will also see the bubble and can leave a comment.

I just tweeted the other day about Convotrack. When I want to know what people are saying about a specific website, that’s what I use. It’s not the same as Sidewiki, but I think it produces the same if not better results. Convotrack is powered by Backtype, which helps you locate any comments you’ve left across the entire web. With Convotrack, not only are you seeing comments users have left about a specific URL from blog across the web, but you get to see tweets about the site as well. I find this to be extremely useful and more powerful in my opinion. It’s also doesn’t make Google the owner of the comment data, which some see as a very bad thing.

Conclusions

Sidewiki is a cool concept, but not a new one. I’m not sure that it won’t end up just as irrelevant as Google Knol or SearchWiki. The fact that it’s a toolbar, even thought it’s Google’s toolbar, immediately turns me off. I don’t do toolbars. I hear there are plans for it to be integrated directly with Chrome, though. Google is adding another layer of comments on top of a web that is already thick with ways to comment. Something like Convotrack, which just pulls comments together from existing sources, is good enough for me. If there are those who feel hosting these meta-comments with Google and letting them decide which comments are relevant and which are not is useful, than Sidewiki should do well.