Owyang Sees Email In Sidewiki Future

Jeremiah Owyang stumbles around in the brush, trying to figure out what Google is up to now that they have release Sidewiki. Sidewiki is not a wiki, but does appear on the left hand side of various browsers, so the name is merely half-wrong. And perhaps the product is too.

Sidewiki is a page commenting tool, reminiscent of Third Voice and Me.dium. Oddly, you have to install the entire Google toolbar to get it to work, which is a hassle, but then you could see comments from others who have visited and ‘sidewikied’ on any page.

Jeremiah suggests that Sidewiki is part of a grand strategy, and suggests that it involves their beachhead in email:

[via Google’s SideWiki Shifts Power To Consumers –Away From Corporate Websites]

Expect Google to evolve this feature [he means Sidewiki, which is more like an app than a feature] with existing systems. Google recently launched profiles, a feature that is the foundation for extending their social reach. With large social networks like Gmail already in place (That’s right, email is a social network) they can eventually sort content on SideWiki by context of friends, experts, or other sources. Google’s strategy is to ‘envelope’ the web this is typical of their approach.

I find it odd that Owyang doesn’t mention Google Wave — an ambitious and mindbending collaboration system — or Gmail’s contacts as other function points where Google could push something like Sidewiki.

But I don’t see how or why Gmail plays here, though. Email is an inherently closed system — only those on the to: and cc: line can see an email — and it has its own approach to threading of discussions. Gtalk might be a more interesting place to conjecture about opening up to a more public commenting space, but you run aground yet another threaded discussion model.

Sidewiki seems to fight with Google’s Friend Connect system in a way, although FC requires the owner of the website to install FC javascript to get it to work at present. But the modern mania for framed-in pages with a navigation bar (a la StumbleUpon and various URL shorteners) suggests an alternative way for extending the social functionality on a site.

Unlike Jeremiah, I guess I can’t see a grand strategy here, and no likelihood that it will pop up in email. And I am surprised that Google has resurrected a social pattern in Sidewiki that has been tried so many times before without great success, but has not pushed into the very interesting space that Discus, JS-Kit and others are occupying, with external and connected commenting systems. Maybe they could cook something up with Sidewiki.