The Google Sidewiki – What was it?
“Rest in peace, we did not know ye well”. We are now very close to the death of the Google Sidewiki. While it was alive, and at its prime, it frightened many, and caused a lot of debate.
The Google Sidewiki was a browser sidebar that would allow you to contribute and read information alongside any web page, well, almost any. However, many did not know anything about it, and a lot of people just ignored it altogether. However, I recently was informed by Google that the Sidewiki was on the way out, via this announcement which landed in my inbox recently. Here is some of that standard email:
“Dear Sidewiki contributor – You are receiving this mail because you have contributed one or more entries to Sidewiki. We have decided to discontinue Sidewiki, so we want to make sure you have a chance to export your valuable contributions. If you wish to export your Sidewiki entries, you will need to do this before December 5, 2011, after which time we’ll be discontinuing support for Sidewiki and deleting all content“
– The Sidewiki team
Sidewiki examples
I came across the Google Sidewiki in 2009. There was so much interest in my own company, Philips, as well as in many others, that I had a standard PowerPoint presentation that I was called upon to present on many occasions. I kept many of the screenshots. The above example was from the Apple web site, and the example below is from a healthcare example.
Installing the Google Sidewiki
The Google Sidewiki could be installed via the Google toolbar.
Using and avoiding the Google Sidewiki
Once you had the toolbar and the ability to see Sidewiki posts, then you could also share posts. I spent some time trying to find out how to block the Sidewiki posts, so that I could do this if the need came around. Some web sites were set up to help with the task of blocking the Sidewiki, e.g. blocksidewiki.com. I also found out that the Sidewiki posts could not work on secure web sites (https).
Site owners had the ability to leave a “master entry” that would appear in the top position in the Sidewiki for all the pages on their website, and was recognizable by its green background. Regulated industries were very interested in this option. Here is a healthcare example.
These site master entries could also be used to promote as well as act as disclaimers.
Taking back some control? Monitoring Google Sidewiki Comments.
One of the issues for Social Media managers like me at that time was the limited options to monitor sidewiki posts made on your company web site. The toolbar option was not good enough if your company had 100s of web pages online, like Philips at that time. So I was delighted to see the announcement on 16th November 2009, about the Sidewiki Data API. This is basically what I used from that API
Outlook or reader integration came from using the RSS feeds created by the API.
So finally I could monitor all my company domains for sidewiki comments, and at that point I hardly saw any! Maybe there was no fun in dropping Sidewiki comments when so many site owners could actually find them far more quickly than before. We will never know for sure.
I have already saved my Google Sidewiki posts. I did not have that many as I was reading the ones that were made on my company web site more than posting. That was two years ago, and now the Sidewiki is on the way out, yet another Social Media application hits the dust. However, we learn, and move on, yes, we move on.
Why did Sidewiki die?
“Google Sidewiki failed because users didn’t adopt the universal, browser-based commenting system, website owners disliked losing control over their content and the associated value, and it was a late entry into a web already populated by numerous social and commenting platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Google itself acknowledged the rise of the “social Web” made Sidewiki redundant” – Google
- User adoption was low: The concept of a universal, sidebar-based comment system for the entire web failed to gain traction with users, who found it less effective than dedicated platforms.
- Disliked by website owners:Owners felt Sidewiki took value and control away from their sites by placing discussions outside their own platforms, creating “channel conflict” with their own blogs and forums.
- Competition from established platforms: By the time Sidewiki launched, the social web was already thriving, with established platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook already serving as hubs for website discussions and engagement, making Sidewiki feel late and unnecessary.
- Redundancy and complexity: Sidewiki added another layer to website interaction, forcing users to use a separate tool (the Google Toolbar) to access additional comments, which was seen as messy and extra work.
- Superceded by the “social Web”: Google ultimately saw the widespread innovation and adoption of other collaborative social tools as making Sidewiki obsolete, which is why they shuttered it to focus on other social efforts.
- Privacy concerns and spammers: Early versions had privacy issues, and the potential for spammers to populate the sidebar quickly became a concern, detracting from its potential usefulness.
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