Google SideWiki Brings Comments To Everyone 221
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.
"this sucks" (Score:2, Insightful)
itll be 99% 0f the comments especially on slashdot
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itll be 99% 0f the comments especially on slashdot
Actually it'll be "this sucks-beta".
Suck this spam, voters (Score:2)
Of course, we'll need another Firefox add-in to block crap from known sleazebags and protect from the malignant content that will turn out to be embeddab
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Re:"this sucks" (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Google,
Bringing Digg to the whole Internet is NOT a Good Thing.
- The Internet
Misnamed product (Score:5, Insightful)
The headline on Google's Get Google Sidewiki [google.com] 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.
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accurately describe the end result
To augment your position, I believe the above describes an ability most end users lack in the first place. The quality of the output will probably be akin to the music produced by hooking an amplifier up to a microphone while recording a garbage disposal unit choking on a fork.
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"Contribute helpful information to any web page." (Score:2)
Maybe they have developed a "helpful information" filter?
Really, if they have - I'll buy me some of that.
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It'd be nice if I could join a group of like-minded computer enthusiasts, and comment on relevant articles with them, maybe even hold discussions.
Maybe some kind of rating system to filter out the spam. And a way to thread the discussion.
And it'd be neat if I could post journal entries and stuff.
Oh, right. I'm already on /.
No more than a tech demo (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite the name, Sidewiki is not a wiki such that people can edit, prune, and synthesize information, nor is it moderated in any way. It's just a comment system, with no way to amplify the signal vs the noise. It's also unclear how people are supposed to use it- e.g., what to post (which is a significant failing imo). Interesting as an approach to layer user comments onto webpages, but not useful yet. Arstechnica pretty much nailed it with the following:
This new offering from Google is intriguing in some ways and it shows that the company is thinking creatively about how to build dialog and additional value around existing content. The scope and utility of the service seems a bit narrow. The random nature of the existing annotations suggest that the quality and depth of the user-contributed content will be roughly equivalent with the comments that people post about pages at aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit.
What makes Wikipedia content useful is the ability of editors to delete the crap and restructure the existing material to provide something of value. Without the ability to do that with Sidewiki, it's really little more than a glorified comment system and probably should have been built as such. As it stands, I think that most users will just be confused about what kind annotations they should post.
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It's just a comment system, with no way to amplify the signal vs the noise.
If it is anything like Google Groups... It will be nothing but spam.
Seriously... I must have reported over 500 spam posts with no response on the finance forums.
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Two words:
First post!
Thats what they will add - hordes of idiots scouting the web for places to write first post.
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Maybe that's part of the plan?
Re:No more than a tech demo (Score:5, Funny)
It's just a comment system, with no way to amplify the signal vs the noise.
Yo dawg, we'll just put a comment system in the comment system so we can comment on the comments on the web page while we comment on the web page.
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Yo dawg, we'll just put a comment system in the comment system so we can comment on the comments on the web page while we comment on the web page.
i.e. ... Slashdot.
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No way, dude! If it were truly insightful, I would have thought of it first!!
It was funny though. ;^)
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Despite the name, Sidewiki is not a wiki such that people can edit, prune, and synthesize information, nor is it moderated in any way.
As you will note if you turn on Sidewiki for this page, you're incorrect. Users are (what seems to be like randomly) selected to moderate comments in a "useful/not useful" fashion.
Slashdot: the strawman construction engine.
Terrific. (Score:5, Insightful)
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No kidding! Imagine surfing to a web page selling something, only to find a comment telling you can get something cheaper elsewhere. Or any other similar type of thing.
Considering wikipedia is absolutely stuffed full of astroturf, why does anyone think this will end up any different?
Looks like just another of these ideas that will start off nobly, but rapidly descend into commercial Hell and lawsuits.
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"astroturf" means fake testimonials, not ads, which are generally called "spam".
So saying "you can get this cheaper elsewhere" is not "astroturfing". A fake post from a "customer" saying "I bought this and it is wonderful" or "it really sucks" would be astroturfing.
Of course this will collect plenty of both spam and astroturf.
Re:Terrific. (Score:4, Insightful)
And spam. Lots and lots of spam
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Which is great. Because it'll get the turf herders distracted by a whole new channel. One that I don't have to look at. Google will bring massive resources to bear destroying the spammers and turfers, the spammers and turfers will all put massive effort into spewing their seed into it, and all of that effort might make a few spammers too busy to try and hack my PHP-Nuke site for a week or so.
WARNING: POSSIBLE SPAM --- Though, I'd like to take a moment and lay some down some astroturf for NukeSentinel, b
No Chrome? (Score:5, Interesting)
It takes the form of a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer
What, Google aren't even releasing plug-ins for their own browser first? What kind of endorsement is that?
Re:No Chrome? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No Chrome? (Score:5, Interesting)
Chrome will support it built in to the new version.
Hmm, wrong:
(from the Ars Technica comments)
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See as they don't really support plugins in the current version, that'd be a bit hard.
Next release has it. I think you can even get the alpha of it, but I'm waiting for the 28th.
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Did that happen in the last month?
One thing though.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One thing though.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Blocks? I'd rather see it rank 4chan higher.
Think SideWiki on Scientology.org by Anonymous
Oh goody. Youtube comments everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Experience has provided me with some skepticism regarding the intelligence of crowds. This Sidewiki would be like having a running commentary on the web, written by the same type of people who write Youtube comments and -1 rated comments on Slashdot.
Thanks, but no thanks. Hope that one dies in beta, unless they figure out how to filter out the crap, and bring the valuable contributions to the top. They could start by testing their filters on Youtube.
SpamWiki (Score:2)
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The only way this could work is if site owners could somehow manage the content, perhaps by authorizing some users to leave comments. Or perhaps they'll work it like Adwords, where the highest-paying contributor is listed first -- and maybe the site is paying for that. Or there would be some kind of vetting process for contributors.
Never mind. You're right, it will never work.
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Oh god.... what's going to happen in the Sidewiki comments on YouTube?
Or... imagine the SideWanki comments on FaceBook or MySpace.
The mind boggles at the potential for sustained vacuity.
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Re:Oh goody. Youtube comments everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you not read the links from TFA:
http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=157294 [google.com]
It might work, or it might suck. Only one way to find out...
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You forgot all the "Looking for dates! Got to www.spamforlife.com!!!!" or "Get v1gr@a!! Cheep! You long tool now!" ads that will clog every other comment. Very few sites ever maintain their comments.
How to resolve Troll comments (Score:3, Insightful)
Add a rating system, not unlike Amazon has for it's products. Basically, viewers can rate the comments up or down; significantly negative comments will eventually be eaten by the system. Significantly good comments will be presented in order of appearance. Additionally, it would be good to have a section presenting the 3 comments with the fewest votes, so the viewer would be likely to add his own vote to those.
No Thanks. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Then
Cluttered browser window + desirable plug-in == Wiki nonsense?
Oh, wait.. damn it..
Mission Implausible (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed, there's no practical way to moderate comments. Everyone, mod parent up!
Sync With Other Commenting Apps (Score:3, Insightful)
Sad and lame.
SearchWiki (Score:3, Interesting)
How do site owners disable it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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This is truly scary. Site owners are forced to install this plugin in their own browsers to see what others are writing about their site.
and what if I don't *want* comments on my site? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site?
Block FF, IE, and Chrome from accessing your site.
Re:and what if I don't *want* comments on my site? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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If users talk about my site, it isn't instantly accessible to the whole Internet in a permanently archive-able form.
It's a take on the Out of Sight, Out of Mind principle.
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The Ostrich Principle.
Re:and what if I don't *want* comments on my site? (Score:5, Funny)
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).
Link, PLEASE!
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He might be this guy:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dotancohenpics/sets/72157594412481833/ [flickr.com]
Maybe the comments are deserved (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't understand the WEB. (Score:2)
I can visit your webpage with Firefox, even If you don't like it. And save your photos, even If you don't like that. I can print your website, and store it forever, even zip that, and send to other people.
I can see your website in a monocrome monitor (hell.. yea, there are people, artist types that will hate that). I can EAR your website, with a reader. I can "touch" your website with a 3d printer, etc..
On the web is the user that control the experience.
Do you know CSS? Is Cascade Style Sheet. The brows
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Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site?
I have, and it works: provide interesting, good quality stuff that people like. If you can't do that, then decide not to go public. I can't, so I don't. It's really that simple when you understand.
Been there, Done that. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Yahoo already has Searchpad (Score:3, Insightful)
Yahoo already has Searchpad. Honestly, Yahoo's search results interface is chock full of features that people aren't noticing until someone like Google copies it.
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ah... that because no-one is using Yahoo. They rolled out a new portal the other day, did anyone notice? No.
portal (Score:2)
They rolled out a new portal the other day, did anyone notice? No.
I'll have to go take a look. I heard nothing about it.
Does Sidewiki phone home? (Score:2, Interesting)
Does this give Google a real-time ping with the URL for each and every page I visit?
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How else do you think google knows what comments are left for any particular page?
a great glorious day in troll technology (Score:4, Funny)
the enemies of trolls are legion, and trolls are under siege. however, recent technological research has uncovered an entirely new parallel dimension of troll content overlaying the entire web, without any of the typical anti-troll technology in place
a fertile, virgin land, a new world, ready for colonization and plenty of glorious trolling like "no, u stfu!" and "This web page sounds like typical Obama style fascist socialism"
Useful in certain cases (Score:2, Interesting)
Subversive idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Extrinsic annotations. It is something that has certainly been talked about for years, though has never really gained much traction. It is also implicit (in part) in some standards like RDF. It comes down to this: How to you say something about content where you do not control the content, and still have your comments seen? Today, if the White House puts out a press release, you can certainly comment it on your blog, on Twitter, in comments to a news article, etc., but you have zero power to make your comments appear in the context of the original press release. The content author is king, and those with high Google PageRank have disproportionate (though not undue) exposure and influence. Sure, we have blogs, which encourage reader commentary, but this is exclusively at the sufferance of the page owner.
But now, with extrinsic annotations, anyone can comment on anyone's web page and have it appear in the context of that web page. I can comment on the White House press release, and so can everyone nut in the world. This is totally subversive and can easily be used for good or evil, but since this is the web it will likely be used for spam and porn more than anything else.
The challenge is how do you prevent this approach from collapsing under the oppressive weight of the vast banality of mass humanity? The web had the same problem, which PageRank solved (in part). We may need something analogous to tame the new "meta web".
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The web had the same problem, which PageRank solved (in part). We may need something analogous to tame the new "meta web".
Pagerank created a new problem, though. Before it, doing a search on a random search engine generally produced useful results. After it, doing a search on a random search engine largely produced link aggregate sites with no content dedicated to boosting the relevance of each other and affiliated sites.
If Google joins the already crowded field of metacommenting services but puts their Pageranky twist on it, I imagine that commenters will follow the example of the link aggregators and spam the service with
Lemme sum up the comments.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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!!
Well, if nothing else... (Score:2, Funny)
Google: Branded firefox can go fuck itself. (Score:2)
I suppose that no googlites in their ivory tower has heard about the firefox trademark issue, and certainly has no idea how trivial it is to determine if a browser is firefox based despite it's silly name.
No, they insist I go from Iceweasel 3.5 to Official firefox 2.0 in order to try out their toys.
Let me think about this tradeoff for a second. Hrm. no.
user based white listing ? (Score:2)
Mandatory Installation (Score:2, Insightful)
If you own a Web site, then you are forced to install this.
Otherwise how could you know what insightful comments have been posted against your web pages.
And then, of course, you will be tempted to comment on other pages.
Exponential growth!
hoodwink'd (Score:2)
Whatever happened to hoodwink'd? That was an excellent service. It required enough of a learning curve to participate that it was never subject to the same lack of intelligence that plagues YouTube comments and the like.
I like exclusivity (when I'm among the included, anyway). :)
And oh, by the way... (Score:2)
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What a complete waste of my time this adventure was.
Would be cool with "community" functionality (Score:2)
So close yet so far (Score:3, Interesting)
What I mean by that last point is that you'd have the ability to 'mod up' posters rather than comments, and moreover your moderations would only apply to you. No one else would see your mods, nor would you see anyone else's, except that you would have the option to make your mods recursive: if you moderate Bob at +1, then maybe you would see Bob's +1-modded posters at +0.5, and those posters' +1-modded posters at +0.25, and so on.
Of course, the moderation and PGP signatures would be completely optional, and would be applied in addition to regular spam filtering like that of existing Usenet and email clients.
I had a plugin for Netscape 4 that did this (Score:3, Informative)
Back in 1996 or so I had a Netscape 4 plugin that did this.
Someone tries to do it again every few years.
*sigh*
People need to study their history.
Google may succeed in this because of the wide distribution of their toolbar, but that is the only difference in this effort.
More advertising? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if Google will put advertising banners at the top of the sidewiki bar, as another way to make themselves money off other people's content?
Is it for sarcastic comments? (Score:3, Funny)
wiki ? (Score:3, Informative)
It's called a wiki, but from what I've seen I don't see any wiki functionality at all. It looks a lot more like a blog, or rather the comment section of a blog to me.
Why do the call it wiki when I can leave a comment, but not participate in a kind of "review of this page" site? Basically, when it is not a wiki?
Re:I had an idea like this once (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I think I'll pass...
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-snip-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. -snip-
That's probably a good thing. Do you really want to go to a popular web site and see the comments of millions of people starting at you...
How this will unfold.... (Score:5, Funny)
The first iteration will have everybody posing unmoderated, and anon. The 4chan guys will quickly demonstrate to Google the foolish error of it's ways.
The second iteration will allow moderation via some sort of community ranking or tagging. This will seem awesome until the spammers write bots to boost their spam postings to the top of the moderation heap. Google will be shamed again.
The third iteration will allow people to create accounts, and track their karma. Users will be able to filter out comments below a certain level, and moderate statements they disagree with as 'trolls'.
It then will be the perfect system.
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The trolls will stake out territories early, like a game of Risk, only with Slashdot instead of Kamchatka. We'll know this era as the Internet War.
whitehouse.gov will be an epic battlefield
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You think that's bad? Just imagine sites like Fox News, Free Republic, or DailyKOS.
Think about video game sites, especially anything that could maybe be considered favorable to one console or manufacturer. Think about Microsoft and Apple.
Think about religious sites. Think about atheism sites. Think about topics like abortion or gay marriage.
Anything that has even the slightest chance of being controversial is going to become a free-for-all. This has the potential to be a trainwreck of epic proportions.
Re:I had an idea like this once (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Yes, I test drove one of those plugins some time ago. It's so long ago, I can't even remember which one. After just a few hours, I uninstalled it. User comments were more than 90% frivolous, 5% pure stupid, and the remainder made me doubt my understanding of the English language, if not my sanity.
I might try this, I might not, but I certainly don't have any high hopes for it.
1960: Ted Nelson, Project Xanadu (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's a great idea, the only problem is making it actually work. Some folks have been trying for almost fifty years. [wikipedia.org]
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I had an idea once. It was a mat. With different conclusions written on it. That you could jump to.
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Actually XMosaic did contain annotation functionality. You could add personal annotations to a web page (which could be seen only by yourself), and you could also add public annotations (but I think the web site would have had to cooperate).
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Are there any FF plugins that currently do that?
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Everyone worthwhile, then.
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Aw, I don't have any mod points to give you.
Yes, this is yet another vector for XSS attacks that aren't even under the site owner's consent or control.