This September, Google launched yet another weapon in its quest for online dominance — the “Google Sidewiki.” Basically, once downloaded as part of the Google Toolbar, the Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar next to any Web page that you visit. It allows you to read and write comments about that particular site or topic without needing to go through the site’s owners. Google even used an algorithm to rank the most relevant entries first, rather than displaying them chronologically, to help minimize spam.
Google’s Sidewiki also takes relevant comments and displays them next to other Web pages that contain the same text snippet. For example, feedback on President Obama’s speech will be shown on other Web pages that include the same speech. What’s more, the Sidewiki pulls related posts from blogs and other online sources that talk about the Web page you are currently visiting, and displays them so you can read the information.
Already, some analysts, developers and bloggers are calling the Sidewiki a game changer. Josh Bernoff, senior VP of idea development at technology and market research firm Forrester Research, said it was a “land grab” that can become huge within a few years. In a research report, Bernoff and co-author Sean Corcoran advised companies to take back control now by monitoring and responding to comments, and by building their own social features — such as consumer ratings and comment boxes — into their own sites.
Indeed, Google Sidewiki “further re-defines media, when anybody can ‘report’ their opinions and facts on any web page,” says Mark Rose, Director of Internet PR Strategies at the Influence Consulting PR firm in New York. On PRblognews.com, he writes that the primary function of public relations is no longer “How do I get the media to cover me?”, but “How do we impact our audience through our own media?”
Sidewiki, however, is not without its critics. Some bloggers are concerned that it could divert responses from their blog posts to Google, and they are voicing their opposition. “Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it,” says Jeff Jarvis, blogger and author of the Harper Collins book What Would Google Do? “This isn't like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict versus me. It robs my site of much of its value."
There’s also fear that Google Sidewiki is vulnerable to spammer abuse, and that it “finds itself at odds with content publishers, as its ongoing wars with book and newspaper publishers continues,” notes PCMagazine.
Finally, it’s important to note that other companies have made similar attempts in the past, without much success. In 1999, for example, Web start-up “Third Voice” launched a service that let people annotate sites through a browser plug-in. The company faced opposition from Web site owners and folded two years later due to a lack of funding, reports Wired Magazine. While Sidewiki has Google’s impressive financial backing, mainstream users would still have to “bite the bait” and make a habit of writing and reading comments, for Sidewiki to succeed.
Eric Schonfeld, co-editor at TechCrunch, believes this is a long shot. “Marking up the Web has limited appeal to the average consumer,” he writes. Schonfeld believes that a better approach would be to “make Web annotation an enterprise product and go after a specific industry that will actually value (and pay) for it.” As an example, he cites the newly launched “WebNotes PR” by WebNotes, a firm that develops online research tools. Basically, WebNotes PR enables public relations firms to highlight text and annotate relevant Web pages that they could then share with clients for a fee.
So will Google Sidewiki be a game-changing breakthrough or a bust? It’s still too soon to say. But maybe the game plan isn’t really to “change” the game, but to simply grab more territory in the ongoing browser wars. After all, while Sidewiki works with Internet Explorer, Firefox and eventually Google Chrome, users would still have to download and install the Google Toolbar to be able to use it. And the Google Toolbar, of course, includes Google’s search function, among other features. A wise move for Google in that regard, and possibly already a “win.”
