What Does Google SideWiki Mean for Businesses, Publishers and the Social Web?

Google’s launch of SideWiki last week has led to a wave of criticisms and speculations.

What is SideWiki?

In essence, SideWiki allows Google Toolbar users on Firefox and Internet Explorer to comment on any website, even those that haven’t enabled comments. The comments are displayed in a sidebar, ranked by usefulness based partly on user voting. The comments can be shared on email, Blogger, Twitter and Facebook and are aggregated on the user’s Google profile. Here are my SideWiki comments on my Google profile. If you click on one of these shared links, you can see the SideWiki comment even if you haven’t installed Google Toolbar.

If you are a website owner, you can claim your website and the first comment on any page on your website will be your own comment.

What boes SideWiki mean for Google?

Google’s strategy is not to build a social network (Orkut only works in India and Brazil), but to treat the entire web as a social network, anchored around the Google Profile. With comments in SideWiki and Google Reader, it’s easy to see how Google is doing it.

It will become really interesting if Google pushes the social aspects even more. SideWiki moves the default reading experience from reading alone to reading with others. The next step is to move to reading with others like us and, perhaps, even reading with friends. That’s the direction in which Google Reader has been moving.

I’ll look forward to how Google improves the usability of SideWiki (I’m not a big fan of the Google Toolbar)  and integrates it with Chrome. I’ll also be interested in seeing how Google monetizes SideWiki. I’ll be surprised if Google tries to sell advertising against SideWiki comments, especially in the context of the all round negative reactions to SideWiki.

What does SideWiki mean for publishers?

Some publishers have reacted negatively to SideWiki because it limits their ability to curate the conversation on their website, get Google juice for the comments and place ads against them. So, I agree that Google takes the value away from publishers and centralizes it, both in terms of attention and the ability to monetize it.

However, SideWiki does have an API and it won’t be long before blogging and commenting systems (like WordPress, MovableType, Disqus, IntenseDebate and Echo) integrate Sidewiki into their main comment flows. Disqus and Echo are already aggregating comments from all over the social web into main comment flow.

SideWiki might also lead to more comments being written and shared on an overall basis because we don’t need to sign in every time and all our comments are aggregated at one place, under our Google profile. If that happens, it will be a big win for the social web, including the publishers.

What does SideWiki mean for businesses?

Some businesses might react negatively to SideWiki because it limits their ability to ignore negative conversation about their brands. I believe that SideWiki is only one element in a movement towards business and society becoming more open and social. Negative (and positive) conversations about brands are already happening on the social web and the right response is not to ignore them, but to learn from them, and fix the root causes behind them.

So businesses would do well to track comments on SideWiki, along with comments on the rest of the social web, and mine them to gain insight and collaboratively design a talkworthy Experience Ecosystem. Dave and I have described how to do this is our position paper on the 20:20 Social Approach to Social Business Strategy. Do have a look.

Here are some other people who have interesting perspectives on Google SideWiki: Jason Falls, Jeremiah Owyang, Jeff Jarvis 1, Jeff Jarvis 2, Valeria Maltoni, Andrew Keen, Louis Gray, Danny Sullivan, John Batelle, David Sleight, Andy Beard, Steven Hodson, Om Malik, Frederic Lardinois, Philipp Lenssen.