Google SideWiki

Google's SideWiki is part of the latest Google Toolbar (Firefox and IE). It lets you annotate web pages you visit. That's been tried before, and never has caught fire, but it's possible that the Google Toolbar is ubiquitous enough to make this become popular.

However, it needs work. There's no notification or tracking. If you leave a SideWiki comment on this page, I'll never know about it unless I happen to come back here. If I do come back, and respond to your comment with my own SideWiki entry, you'll never know unless you happen to return here.

There's no text formatting - not even bold or italic. It will create links if you use http://someaddress , and will at leaast let you create new paragraphs (don't laugh: the Google DFriend Connect comment gadget did not!), but that's about it. Oh, and you can also drop a YouTube link into a comment, and a video embed frame will be created.

I also wonder how Google intends to deal with Spam. They claim they will rank and filter comments for "quality" and by a commenter's reputation. We'll see.

There's a list of bugs and feature requests at Google Code. You can vote for this one by clicking the "star" just below "Add a comment" at http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=1493.

Discussion at Google Sidewiki API.