Google SideWiki Brings Comments To Everyone

Rophuine writes "Google has launched a product called SideWiki. It takes the form of a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer which allows users to mark up the web by adding comments which can be seen by anyone else running SideWiki." Google's version joins a long line of attempts to impose a layer of comments on the Web, including Microsoft's Smart Tags and Third Voice.

Comments

Misnamed product

[Lord Grey]

To clarify, SideWiki requires the Google Toolbar, which itself requires IE6 (or later) or Firefox 2 (or later).

The headline on Google's Get Google Sidewiki page reads, "Contribute helpful information to any web page." Yet this is being released to the general public, which is the same group that is responsible for most of the crap already on the internet. SideWiki should probably be renamed to Creeping Crud (hello, Wizardry fans) to more accurately describe the end result. But hey, you have to run SideWiki in order to see other SideWiki users' crud, so I guess it's a closed universe and therefore okay.

Terrific.

[FlyingSquidStudios]

A whole new way to astroturf.

Re:Terrific.

[ChienAndalu]

And spam. Lots and lots of spam

No Thanks.

[swanzilla]

Cluttered browser window + Wiki nonsense != desirable plug-in

Re:I had an idea like this once

[sopssa]

There has been hundreds of such plugins for both IE and FF for ever. The problem with them is that they're not build in to the browser and no one uses them. Its quite possible it would be really small amount of users using it even if it was build-in, since its not really why the users are there on the site and it just forgots. It would probably be full of "nice site", "hi everybody!" and "first!1!" comments too.

Mission Implausible

[PeanutButterBreath]

Hard to see how this would be useful without moderation. Hard to see how moderation could be implemented in a practical way.

Re:Mission Implausible

[guyminuslife]

Agreed, there's no practical way to moderate comments. Everyone, mod parent up!

How do site owners disable it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think any business wants comments from morons presented alongside official content. If google want to provide a service allowing people to comment on one of my personal sites, they can damn well provide a web reachable URL. There's no way I'm installing a plugin to keep track of what's going on outside my moderated commenting system.

and what if I don't *want* comments on my site?

[WeirdKid]

I am a little disturbed that I cannot find reference to any way that the site owner can "opt out" of having a sidewiki hooked to their pages. At least with Microsoft SmartTags, there was a way to disable them with a meta tag in the html header, and unlike Microsoft, Google has enough geek fanboys who think Google shits gold out there to make this feature take off.

I used to have comments enabled on my Flickr photos, but jokers kept on leaving suggestive remarks about my wife (she's pretty hot, IMHO). So, I turned it off. When talking about this with a colleague yesterday, we came up with the "ugly kid" scenario:

Imagine you have a family site with pictures of your kids on it and some jerk writes, "man, you have ugly kids" on the sidewiki. What do you do? You can't remove it. Will it be filtered out automatically by Google with their so-called "quality algorithm"? Just because there will be no anonymous posts, don't think that people won't do things like this.

Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site? I'm not against free speech and all that, just don't add it to *my* content without my permission. Whether sidewiki is considered part of the page content is academic: the visitor will see it attached to your page.

Re:and what if I don't *want* comments on my site?

[Lord Ender]

Oh boo hoo! And what if users TALK about your site using their vocal cords?? Site owners must have some technology for disabling users' vocal chords while accessing their sites.

Been there, Done that.

[Eric Freyhart]

There was a system out about 6 or so years ago that would allow anyone to post a virtual "sticky" note on a web page and anyone else who had the program could read it. Same concept as what Google is trying.

All I can remember is the amount of spam and junk that was written up, mostly on webpages that people didn't like or who were rivals. A lot of companies got VERY upset about the system, and the company what created the software pulled it.

Bad idea. Put this one back in the box and try something else Google. Bad idea.

Lemme sum up the comments..

[CRiMSON]

1. Your gay!
2. This is gay
3. NOOB ASS
4. your a noob ass
5. your a fag
6. this is for fags!!
7. BuY v1agr4 n0w
8. 0b4ma will kill us all!!

Re:I had an idea like this once

[mwvdlee]

Even omitting the bullshit comments, these things can go two ways.

1) it'll remain unpopular, making sure that there are too few comments to ever make it useful.

2) it'll become popular, making sure there are too many comments to be usable.

Either way I'm taking the shortcut by just not bothering with it.