googleblog.blogspot.com

Today, we’re launching Google Sidewiki, which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.

As a blog owner (and developer), I hate the idea of off-site comments; especially some that I have no control over. There are two problems when applying this idea to blogs: first, you can’t have the whole discussion on Sidewiki (what’s with the stupid name?), because some of your readers will have it and some won’t; second, some users will comment on individual entries, but some will post comments on the home page, and the discussion will be broken further, even among Sidewiki adopters.

The first problem could be circumvented by letting web developers manually embed Sidewiki on their pages for everyone (as of now they can use an API to access and manage the comments, but they have to develop the whole solution themselves — I wonder if WordPress et al. will end up actually adopting that), but it wouldn’t solve all the problems — ultimately, this is something that many companies have tried to do before, and one thing where I hope Google’s weight doesn’t manage to suddenly trigger adoption. Just let us webmasters manage our own conversation.

It’s already hard enough with people responding to tweets, commenting on Facebook and on FriendFeed, and on Digg or whatever; we don’t need even more dilution. Or is too late to worry about that? Maybe we might as well give up.