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Check out the video on Google Sidewiki or go straight to the Google Sidewiki Page.

At first blush, my thoughts are:

  • Wow, Google really needs another way to collect my browsing history to serve me more ads?
  • I really need another browser toolbar like a hole in the head.
  • All this chatter back and forth to Google in my browser will make it really distracting when I'm using Fiddler

But are there any web development benefits to this I'm overlooking? There seem to be a lot of features in this rollout of a Google Toolbar, perhaps I'm missing something. Tell me your thoughts, pro and con.

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FWIW: You can use Fiddler rules & filters to hide any traffic you're not interested in. – EricLaw -MSFT- Nov 5 '09 at 16:18
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Sep 24 '09 at 17:54

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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

I expect everypage to have F!rst! comments... and not much else.

Google needs to get back to basics and stop trying to jump the shark - not every 20% project needs to see the light of day.

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I wanted to upvote you, but I then removed it. I actually don't know if to agree with you or not. It is clear that google is a huge programming tank, and it's also clear that not everything it produces will become "the next big thing". I think it's in the spirit of an innovative company to try things out and see which ones work. Yes, they could eventually jump the shark, but the alternative is to become a fossil. They already lost the social network battle (orkut was a big flop, due to its brazilian monoculture). They have to keep doing, or they will loose other markets. – Stefano Borini Sep 25 '09 at 23:47
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+1, not because I agree with you completely (about the 20% projects; I agree on the F!rst! :), but because I cannot see the point of it. What is it we're trying to do here ? Leaving comments on pages - for what purpose. Lots of sites of various nature, already support some sort of customer feedback, the ones that don't often don't really need it anyways. So ... – ldigas Sep 26 '09 at 0:11
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up vote 0 down vote

I would be curious to see how the moderation of these 'comments/points' would be handled? After all you would be getting into an area where users can spread rumors / lies / bashing / spamming / hate via your website (if someone has this installed and the content reflects this nature).

Just my frist throught, as it could be something great (additional information that contributes to benefit the visitor), or negative (hate comments, youtube type "i'd do her" or other crap comments).

It could go either way, but then again I'm just assuming from the little reading I've done about it. FYI, I have not installed the toolbar to try tho. Just some points I thought of.

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I expect it to become a cat and mouse game with spammers where they try to get around the Google roadblocks to post garbage at the top of the list. – Mark Sep 24 '09 at 18:04
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I expect most people to not run Google Toolbar in the first place, but past that most sites will either contain no comments, or garbage. The chances of the comments being used in helpful ways similar to the image shown on the download page is slim to none. Are we really missing much by not having a bar on the left of every page that has people claiming "first"? – Will Eddins Sep 24 '09 at 18:53
Google toolbar probably comes installed with a lot of crapware (which it's not necessarily) to run with IE on a lot of computers... – Ivo Flipse♦ Sep 24 '09 at 20:56
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