Do you have dreams on knowing the content of a website without browsing its pages? How about giving a comment on each website you pass-by on a jiffy? Well, now you can. Let me introduce you to the latest add-on release by Google; The Google Sidewiki.
On a nutshell: Sidewiki is a collaborative tool that lets internet visitors share feedback/threads to a community of users who happened to bumped on that page also. Share your expertise? Give a quick pitch about that website? This tool is very promising indeed.
From the mouth of google here’s an excerpt from their official blog statement:
In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you’ll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. 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. If you’re curious, you can read more on our Google Research Blog about the infrastructure we use for ranking all entries in real-time.
You got to see their introductory video
Noticeable Advantages:
Comment to any website you wish is now possible 
Want to say “good job” to a website you like? Or perhaps want to warn people about a wicked page you just browsed. These are all possible now
See a preview of a website just by looking at your wiki-sidebar
Immediately, you can see commentary remarks by people who visited that page before you.
Has an option for users to vote points for a certain comment made on a website.
The higher the points the higher the rate to reach the 1st page of sidewiki results for that site.
Owners introductory-remarks will always be on top
Web-admin can create a “pitch” on their website and it will always be on the top of SideWiki results.
Share your comments on the two most popular social-networking in town; Facebook and Twitter
Disadvantages:
As an owner you can’t directly delete sidebar comments on your website. 
This not a lucrative option for owners. What if a group of people sabotage your web-site and say malicious rants using sidewiki? I mean, it’s hard to report it to Google one by one right?
Finding the relevant “quality” thread is not easy as it may seems.
Though it’s said that you can vote points to get relevant comment. We all know that users (especially the visitors) don’t have the time to vote. In my experience, I visited twitter and I saw the “humungous” list of comments tagged on the homepage alone.
I find it hard to distinguish the significant feedback out from those nuisance.
Options for web-owners to set limits on wiki comments is not yet implemented
Website administrators should have a choice to set a threshold for the quantity of feedback they will receive from users. Added to that, could even block a certain email/profile from giving malicious remarks.
We are waiting for a built-in sidebarwiki feature on Google Chrome
Its strange why Google release this add-on in Firefox and I.E but not in Google Chrome?
Wrap up:
Today, Google surely showed us its another trick on its sleeves tool. The sidewiki function is a very innovative tool that has a dual-edge benefits. Scandals, rants and other pesky opinion that could jeopardize a certain website is highly-possible using this sidebar. I hope the next update will be more about giving option for web-owners to shelter their site from blabbers.
Also, there should be an option wherein users can sort the “most favorable comment” “most recent” perhaps a most controversial comment? Based on the votes of users. This way, searching for the right info will be trouble-free.
Sorting by country will be an ingenious feature too. Let’s face it, knowing that you have international users giving feedback on your website makes the experience much more spicy don’t you agree?
Finally, a world-wide tag-cloud of highly targetted comments is beneficial too :) It will be ingenious to see all the juciest comment around the WWW handed to you on a silver platter ayt?
All I can say is kudus again to Google corp. For releasing a yet another gap shortening tool for users and publishers to interact.
I wonder what will be the “side-wiki” comments of bing and Y! Hmm..
(sources: google sidewiki)
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Tags: google sidewiki advantages, google sidewiki problems, sidewiki add-ons, sidewiki review
