When I first read about Sidewiki today, I was ready to pass on the story altogether.  In all honesty, if this wasn’t Google’s idea, no one would be paying it no mind whatsoever.  I know that in my time at Mashable, I was pitched on at least half a dozen web or browser apps designed to annotate, make more social, or augment the world wide web.  I think I reviewed one of them.  I think of all the ones I was actually pitched, none of them are still around.

In general, people don’t really want to use these things. Loading up sidebars generally takes away from the experience of a web page, causing them to squish up the content you’re actually there to see.  In general, they’re a hassle to get users to install, so adoption isn’t very easy to kickstart. Most importantly, though, they’re generally unnecessary.  I defy you to do ten web searches and find more than five or six results in your top ten that don’t have some way to interact with the content.

So let’s just agree from the outset: this idea is neither revolutionary nor is it that useful.

That said, it isn’t a walled garden.  It isn’t a hedged garden, as Jeff Jarvis termed it. And it’s not a ploy to steal conversations from bloggers, as my good friend Steven Hodson suspects.

So, Other than a Boring Product, What Is It?

Steven, Jeff, and several others have been pretty critical.  Here’s what Steven had to say:

Sidewiki is nothing short of an attempt by Google to take control of the conversations that happen on blogs. Additionally they are forcing bloggers to either install their toolbar or move to the Chrome browser that will have Sidewiki support built into it.

Sorry but using products is a choice and no company has the right to force me to use their products just so I can keep in contact with what my readers are saying. In effect Google is inserting themselves between the reader and the blogger.

Sidewiki might have some interesting features but the service doesn’t add anything to blogs that benefit the blogger. In fact it takes away one of the most important parts of a blog – the conversation – and locks it on the Google servers. As problematic as blog commenting systems might be, even with 3rd party options like Disqus, JS-Kit, and Intense Debate, the conversation content remains where it is suppose to – on our blogs.

I agree with Steven up to a point – it’s fairly devoid of interesting features.  It doesn’t, however, lock up the content on Google’s servers.  When I read several bloggers proclaiming that this was a walled garden, I grew suspicious, since I can’t remember the last time Google rolled out a service that didn’t have some way to hack it or utilize it via API.

Turns out, there’s an API here for Sidewiki, too.

As you can see from the screenshot to the right, you can pull data, post data, update data, as well as do a bit of searching of data based on the URLs associated with a page.

This leaves the door wide open for developers at JS-Kit, Friendfeed Facebook, Disqus and elsewhere to incorporate social data generated by these posts quite easily.

As long as you’re using any sort of advanced commenting system, your conversation can return to it’s home with the blog post.

In essence, this isn’t a whole lot different from the drop-in anywhere comment gadget that came with the seemingly now forgotten Google Friend Connect service (I wouldn’t be surprised, actually, if it functioned off the same codebase).

None of this, though, really tackles the issue of lost revenue through lost pageviews.  Most bloggers live and die by the number of pageviews their blog registers, as most advertising is sold by the CPM. We here at SiliconANGLE don’t really run into that issue with our style of monetization, which for us has allowed us to take a much different approach with how we’ve designed our site (you’ll notice that as of today, you don’t need to refresh the page to see new blog posts, let alone new comments).

The vast majority of bloggers do deal in pageviews, though, and in particular Allen Stern has been vocally critical of services like Facebook and Friendfeed stealing the conversation away from the bloggers, “where they belong.”  It’s a valid argument, but one that I think is ultimately short sighted and uninventive in terms of business models.

Still, it’s a valid concern for most professional bloggers to raise.  The fact is that in the golden age of the social web, conversations will spring up more and more places outside your silo, with or without you.  You can work to leverage them or you can get upset.

So while I’m currently not sold on the awesomeness of this project, I’m not philosophically opposed to it, as many bloggers seem to be.