While on a few long international flights the past few week, I got caught up on my podcast listening.  Unfortunately, I got a bit behind on blog reading.  So, when I got back to my reading, I definitely felt a bit behind when I caught the news about Google’s Sidewiki on Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog.  Needless to say, the post immediately caught my attention.

Jeremiah is spot on with regards to this Google feature being a catalyst for the transition of power from corporations to consumers.  His strategy advice is also very accurate.  If you believe the statement, “Google is your new home page” then you’d probably concur that Sidewiki has just transformed your home page into an unregulated forum.  I have contrarian though, however.  I think Google will fail with this initiative long before it becomes relevant.

The following are 5 reaons why Google will fail with Sidewiki:

  1. Where’s The Authority Component – Social Media is based on authority.  Whether authority is measured in followers in Twitter, friends on Facebook, or even Google’s own page rank indicator, today’s social media relies on it.  When social media concepts lack an authority component, they quickly become inundated in SPAM and irrelevant content.
  2. First In First Out (FIFO) is for Accountants –  Sidewiki’s commenting system is based on a first in first out queue.  In layman’s terms, the first to comment gets the top position.  This is how comments work in most blogs and news sites.  Still, this simplistic approach significantly limits the dynamics of comment relevancy and recency.   Though this aspect of Sidewiki is very easily changed, it goes to show that Google has not thoroughly thought this one out.  (Editor’s Note – Post research has revealed that FIFO is not the case but Google is applying an algorithm to this.  I will still argue that this is far from social and we are already getting emails with tricks for beating the algorithm)
  3. Name A New Idea Google Has Followed Through On – Google has a lot of ideas.  They really don’t follow through however.  Whether it be their half baked effort in the offline advertising space or their attempt to compete with Microsoft with a wordprocessor that still doesn’t support DOCX and a spreadsheet that barely rivals the functionality of DOS spreadsheet packages, Google wants to compete from operating systems to social media concepts and they’ve shown very little focus or follow through.
  4. Advertisers Pay The Bills – Google makes its money from advertising.  When you open up a free for all on the very results page that corporate advertisers are pay for placement, big spenders will draw the line.  You can’t have it both ways.
  5. Google’s Legal Department Can’t Keep Up – Sidewiki can only survive with the protections provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  Still, CDA is being activity tested in the courts due to the abuses from sites such as RipOffReport.Com.  It is only a matter of time before holes are poked in this federal law.   In the meantime, Google’s legal department has gotten to the point of not even returning DMCA takedown notices nor attorney inquiries to orders from state courts regarding content in their index.  Sidewiki will open the legal flood gates to the point to where the class action law firms will begin to package individual complaints into legal maneuvering that cannot be ignored.

I wish Google were a bit more social.  I’d simply like to see a “view count” on search results similar to the way YouTube provides them.  Or maybe even an indexing of tiny URL’s that were associated with retweets in Twitter.  Sidewiki, however, lacks a true social media foundation.  Google should stick to indexing content including that produced by true social media sites before it goes on to try and make its flagship search service a social media platform.