Personally, I think SideWiki is a horrible idea. Very invasive. Just too many ways for it to be hacked and spammed and used against competitors and just taken advantage of.
It’s opening the doors for an immense amount of spamming, as soon as spammers figure out how get themselves a good quality score, and then automate placing SideWiki comments on anything and everything. Spammers are an annoyance, and may turn people off to using SideWiki at all. This is the least of Google’s problems.
Google seems to be opening itself up for many different kinds of lawsuits, but so far it doesn’t seem to care.
First of all, it can potentially hurt eCommerce businesses, rerouting a visitor from a page (that the site owner may have paid to get) to a competing site based on a free comment & link, courtesy of SideWiki. For example, imagine visiting a page for a digital camera on RitzCamera.com and seeing a SideWiki comment that says “I’ve seen this same item cheaper at Amazon” with a cloaked affiliate link pointing to it. To me, this potential “link dropping” seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a site owner, I would be tempted to sue if I can show that Google is helping redirect traffic — even paid traffic — away from my site by adding content that I have no control over.
I think it also has the potential to harm a site’s reputation much more than help it. (Many more people become vocal about a bad customer experience than a good one.) For example, if a site has a temporary customer service issue, detrimental comments could prevail within the site’s Sidewiki comments for months… even after the problem is corrected. Before, people had to search for review sites, the ratings on shopping sites, or the BBB to try to determine if a site is reputable and customer-friendly or not. Now they can see complaints while visiting the site itself. This could cause a great deal of extra work and expense for a site to clean up comments that are appearing on its own site(!) And who’s to say all of the negative comments are true? Some (or all) could be created by a competitor with a flair for creating Google profiles.
Does anyone moderate the comments? Google’s trying to do this with automation and some business rules, but it still seems pretty open to me. On any page that doesn’t have any comments yet, your comment is pretty much guaranteed to be shown. On the other hand, I have also heard that Google has — in special cases — intervened and manually removed comments. (If this is true, what’s the criteria? Several million dollars a month in AdWords spend?)
For these reasons and more, businesses generally seem to be against SideWiki. Pharmaceutical companies have been especially vocal so far in demanding that Google provide some sort of “opt out” service that would allow a site owner to prevent Sidewiki comments from appearing on their sites. (This raises a question about what kinds of comments the pharma’s are trying to quash… but that’s a completely different issue.) PharmExec.com has published an online article endorsing the use of plug-in’s and other methods to disable SideWiki on a site. They also encourage pharmaceutical executives to threaten Google with legal action (one firm “intend(s) to examine the legal ramifications of presenting our copyrighted content in conjunction with materials which are not authorized or licensed for use with our Web site…(We) intend to pursue Google as we would any newspaper or print media which does the same and with intent to recover damages and/or legal expenses incurred.”) and even contacting their Congressional representatives.
I will not be participating in Google’s SideWiki experiment. I will be encouraging businesses — especially businesses with a large, highly-paid legal staff — to pressure Google for an opt out service. Most importantly, I will be taking every comment I see within SideWiki with a large grain of salt… just like I do when I read anything in cyberspace.
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