Today Google released their newest addition to the Google toolbar called Sidewiki, Sidewiki allows you to add to your Google Reader shared item from any site directly. I used it a couple of times today and it works, the comments that I made on SideWicki appeared under my Google Reader shared items. This being said I don’t think I will be using SideWiki. There are several reason for this, which I will now explain.
The first is it is only available at this time on Firefox and Internet Explorer, I am presently using mostly Chrome and Safari. This addition is not enough to make me switch to either Firefox or IE. Second, I already use Google Reader, which means anything I share there is already going to my shared item list. The third and most important reason is it takes away from on site comments. If I am on a site then I am going to put my comments directly on the site. Having a blog myself, I know how important comments are to a site creator. Comments should remain on a site, unless the site creator decides differently. There are already enough dispersing of comments off of the original site to social sharing sites like Twitter and Friendfeed. It is unecessary for Google to add to this dispersing , it just further diminishes the value of the originating site and adds nothing to Google Reader’s value.
It would be better if Google instead worked on a method, that would have any comment made on Google reader also appear the original site instead. SideWicki already permits sharing with Twitter and Facebook, how hard can it be to allow the share to go back to the original site. Yes, I know I could copy and paste the comment, but that is something that is easy to forget to do and shouldn’t be necessary. Until comments made on Sidewiki automatically appear on the original site I will not be using Google’s SideWiki.