Sidewiki: Leave a comment about any website
Google has now come up with the service called SideWiki which literally allows someone using their Google account to leave a comment and look up comments for any website they visit.
I am not sure how web-site developers will feel about this as most web developers take it for granted they can control or filter the comments made when people visit their websites.
Whats cool about SideWiki?
- Google Sidewiki will be a part of Google Chrome directly instead of a toolbar in the future. Users with the old Google’s old toolbar for Firefox and IE will get the option to upgrade so they can avail of Sidewiki.
- Users will be able to share the comment using Email, Twitter and Facebook.
- The comments can be ranked Useful or not and this is the way Google is planning to weed out the spam that very popular websites will attract. The highest ranked comments will stay on the website. The lowest ranked will be at the bottom and probably out of sight.
Link: Google SideWiki
Harsh Agr... (34)
Sourish |... (22)
Sauravjit (10)
Gautam (9)
saorabh (9)
If its a part of chrome then only then them comments will be visible to only those people who visit through the same computer using chrome. All Google can do in future is make all the chrome browsers talk to each other so that user comments can be synced up, but it can never change the website’s original content. A user visiting the site through some other browser or not hitting the google’s cache (IF they decide to sync the comments to their cache as well, which I doubt as that will mess up the search index creation), will still see the site the developer intended him to see.
Moreover, customizing the look n feel and behavior of any website has long been possible using greasemonkey and this SideWiki feels to me nothing but just an overhyped extension to that.
Google has long enjoyed to be the media’s blue-eyed boy. Every little thing they do gets a hell lot of an attention. But now they are feeling the heat of the size they are growing to (Gmail has had 8-9 major service outages in last 1 year!!) .
Lets see how they cope up with their growth.
@Abhishek: yes you are right about the fact that there are many services which allow you to tag or comment on websites, but SideWIki will come with an update of Chrome probably. For now its made available to everyone using Google Toolbar which has SideWiki.
The contents of the comment wont only be available to be seen only on the same computer or browser but across any user as all the comments are stored on Google’s server with the gmail id.
When you see a website, the pages are not served by Google’s servers, they are served by the server hosting the website. Any changes made on the content stored in Google’s servers can in no way alter the contents of the original website.
Again guys,
Internet != Google
if you know what I mean
scot erlandson is the editor in chief of washingtonamerica.com