The future of the social web
I found this while going through Slideshare over the weekend. It’s a 6-month-old presentation that Charlene Li made at SXSW’09, but with Google launching Sidewiki recently, I thought it would be very useful to re-visit the concept of how a social network is going to change. WithSidewiki, you can write your comments to a post alongside it, and they’ll be ordered according to relevancy, preserved for all time.
Here’s what the official Google blog says about it:
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.
Under the hood, we have even more technology that will take your entry about the current page and show it next to webpages that contain the same snippet of text. For example, an entry on a speech by President Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote. We also bring in relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the current page so that you can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to.
I think this is really the beginning of something very powerful for the social web.
4 comments
Google sidewiki is another cynical attempt to hi-jack other people’s content. You also need to install the Google toolbar to use it. File under scumware.
Hijack? hardly. It isn’t saying other people’s content is their own, it just makes it available for others to see. You do need to install the Google toolbar but if I use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader & Google Calendar anyway it’s not a big deal for me :-) Who knows – it may take off or it may sink, like any other product.
Yes, definitely hijack. They just stole my comments and the attendant clicks and therefore money. I call that hijacking. What’s worse is that I now have no ability to moderate what people are saying about my site on my site!
And I’m not the only one who thinks Google Sidewiki is pretty unpleasant.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-sidewiki-network/13501/
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-sidewiki-network/13501/
“Now, Google is telling site owners that they can either participate in SideWiki or else see competitors’ nasty comments dominate the discussion about their site(s). Worst of all, you can’t block Google’s SideWiki from appearing alongside your website so as to opt-out. It’s also unclear whether webmasters will even know when their site is being displayed with SideWiki.”
And another thing! There’s no opt out. As a site owner, it’s a loaded gun literally pointed at your head on your own bleeding domain that you pay £8.99 a flipping year for.
Actually, that’s perhaps a little hyperbolic, and my suspicion is that people will soon ignore it, like they did with the similar-shaped thing Google did with search results a few months back, it will then become a de facto social network for spambots before being quietly put to sleep along with Google Knol, et al.