Google+Sidewiki

Google created a new tool called Sidewiki. Sidewiki was created to allow users to comment on any website they visit. Some thought this new tool was helpful while others said it would be pointless.

In his Blog post [|Google Sidewiki Closing Down], Myke Black states that Sidewikis were supposed to get the "general public" involved in the operation of every webpage they visited, creating a community that spanned the entire Internet. This never happened. According to Myke Black:

" In reality, it was never used to great affect. For nearly every web page that I visited, there were no sidewiki entries. Few people outside of the tech community have heard of sidewikis, and in the end, I turned it off and forgot about it. I don't think sidewikis will be missed by many people other than SEO practitioners who have invested a lot of time in it, and the sidewiki team at google." (2011)

According to the blog Confabulations, there were a few problems with Sidewiki:
 * Comments were not listed in date order; the order of the comments depends on a few factors such as quality of entry, user reputation, etc.
 * Sidewiki was more open to spam
 * Companies posting links in comments may have caused traffic away from the original article
 * There was no way for censorship to weed out racist or other inappropriate comments.

This article raised some obvious concerns and perhaps [|Google] felt some pressure. As of December 5, 2011 Google will be discontinuing Sidewiki. Google states in their announcement: "Over the past few years, we’ve seen extraordinary innovation in terms of making the web collaborative. So we’ve decided to discontinue Sidewiki and focus instead on our broader social initiatives. Sidewiki authors will be given more details about this closure in the weeks ahead, and they’ll have a number of months to download their content."

It is clear that this was a failed experiment, but one with few negative consequences for Google.

Sources: Black, Myke. [|Google Sidewiki Closing Down.]Blog. 2 November 2011. Web. 6 December 2011. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/fall-spring-clean.html