A lot of us Web folks were surprised to hear about Google’s new Sidewiki service last week, which Google announced from their blog on Wednesday, September 23. Sidewiki is a universal commenting service that allows users to associate additional information or commentary with any webpage, thus expanding the “social” aspect of the Web exponentially. Although this service certainly opens up many possibilities for open commentary on websites (Google touts medical applications — doctors commenting on health sites, for example), a method of annotating the entire Web, the announcement was also greeted with a lot of skepticism about Sidewiki’s usefulness and longevity, and a lot of handwringing about its implications for opening new spamming channels and opportunities for competitors to badmouth each other on their websites, and accusations of Google being Evil.
Google has taken a number of precautions to assuage the above-mentioned worries:
- If you have a Google account and profile, your comments have a better chance of being published. And the longer you’ve had the account, the better;
- Your comments will be scanned for inappropriate language;
- Your commenting history will be taken into account, in terms of the priority given your comment or if it’s displayed at all.
Google says:
So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed.
And Google provides much more detail here. And Google’s Sidewiki “Program Policies” lay out the guidelines.
In order to comment via Sidewiki and to view others’ comments, you need to upgrade to the latest version of the Google Toolbar (compatible with Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox 2+ … sorry Google Chrome users!), and set it to “enhanced.” As mentioned above, you also need a Google account and a Google profile. Your Sidewiki comments will appear under a tab on your Google profile.
Once you have enabled Sidewiki, any Web pages you visit that have comments will display like this:
You expand the sidebar by clicking on the arrows or the talk bubble.
If you are the comment’s owner, you can edit or delete the comment at any time after it’s published.
If you have a Google profile, your profile picture will show up next to your comment and your name will link to your Google profile.
You can comment on specific content on a Web page by highlighting the text you want to comment on. You’ll see an “edit” pencil appear to the left of that content, as a small sidebar. Clicking it will open the commenting screen. After you have published your comment, anyone visiting that page with Sidewiki enabled will see a talk balloon next to the content you commented on, and clicking that balloon will open the Sidewiki sidebar. If the content is subsequently deleted, the comment balloon will disappear. If the content is restored, it will show up again.
If the comment is below the fold, you’ll see a number in the bottom left of the screen with a down-arrow below it. Clicking on that takes you to the commented content.
Users can “vote” for comments:
I did some testing with Sidewiki and have concluded that it’s pretty cool. It’s too early to tell how much the comments will be hit by spammers or competitors, but it does allow the posting of URLs. Whether there are SEO implications or not is not clear at this point.
In my initial commenting efforts, I have added comments to my various Web properties that point users to various other related points of interest. If there’s a site whose visitors you believe would be interested in something your site offers, Sidewiki offers an opportunity.
Early Adopters
Of course, it’s easy to see how this could quickly get out of hand or at least very interesting. But it’s surprising how many large sites have no comments. Heck, it’s been almost a week! After you’ve installed Sidewiki, check out how some early adopters are taking advantage of Sidewiki:
Bing: Discussion
Microsoft: Outrage
Center for Disease Control: Expanded information
Google: Discussion
SearchEngineWatch.com: Enhanced marketing
HyperArts: Enhanced marketing
HubSpot: Enhanced marketing
Yahoo!: Announcements
Google has some examples of other usesful ways that Sidewiki can be used.
On the Microsoft website, as of this writing there is just one comment, but it’s a doozy:
Has Google Started a War?
It seems inconceivable to me that I can place a comment against Microsoft’s website and exploit all of its marketing dollars and user base. Not only that I can say whatever I want about them. The ramifications of this defy logic. Competitors will snipe each others web sites. Fundamentalists will be damning each others web sites. Jilted lovers will be making their notes on the senior partners profile, The list goes on and on. Oh and do you think voting this down will help? We will just all head to the last sidewiki to see where the dirt is. I am sorry Google but you are on a course of self destruct on this one.
I would say that if Sidewiki can somehow avoid getting hijacked by spammers, pranksters, and the mutually sabotaging corporate competitors — becoming more of a graffiti area than a resource for useful information — it stands to be a great additional to the Social Web.
Some recommended resources:
Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy Blog. Jeremiah recognizes the implications for corporations with the Sidewiki service and offers these tips:
- Shift your thinking: recognize that you don’t own your corporate website –your customers do. Accept the mindshift that your job is to not only serve up product and corporate content but to also be a platform and enabler for customers to discuss, share, and make suggestions to how you should improve what you offer.
- Develop a social strategy with dedicated resources. With every webpage now potentially social, you’ll need to develop a process, roles, and policy to ensure you’re monitoring the conversation, participating as you would in blog discussions, and influencing the discussion. 80% of success is developing an internal strategy, providing education before a free-for-all happens with customers and employees.
- Don’t be reactive to negative content –embrace social content now. Give users the ability to leave social feedback directly on your corporate webpages, or aggregate existing social content. CMS vendors are developing features to enable this, as well as community platform vendors like Kickapps, Pluck, Liveworld’s Livebar offer rapid deployment options.
