Heard about Google Sidewiki? You need to check it out. This is important. Sidewiki is basically a collapsible browser sidebar (available by free download) that currently works with Firefox (as part of the Google toolbar) and IE. It allows anyone to comment on any website. People can also share what they commented on Twitter, Facebook or by email. (So if you’ve decided to have a blog which doesn’t allow comments, you’re SOL on that one. It’s only a matter of time.)

Here’s more from the Google blog. The comments will not be viewed “most recent first” but will be ranked according to some Googley algorithm. This has already hit a few snags (for example people commenting are finding it hard to find their own comments on pages with a lot of them) but it’s a new tool so I expect it will take a while before all the bugs are ironed out.

Reactions to this have been mixed. Tom Humbarger has a list of positive and negative reactions to this in the tech blogosphere. Jeremiah Owyang provides a useful summary of the implications, Jeff Jarvis says it spells “danger”, and Phil Baumann tests it out on Seth Godin’s famously no-comment blog.

Basically, this is important for YOU because even if this is just going to be used by early adopters right now, we’re talking about Google here. Eventually everyone will be using it; and/or other social networks will follow with competing functionality. Jeremiah says Facebook is already working on it… and he tried it on his own blog page:

“I just tried out SideWiki to see how it works. I came to this very post and found out that there are already three comments. I left a comment welcoming folks, and it gave me the option to Tweet it, which I did. …you don’t [even] have to have the plugin for this to work. Which means that this certainly has lower barriers to adoption. A few other field notes? I no longer have to fuss with [captcha] on blogs or name/email/url once I’m logged in to SideWiki, I can comment around the web. Secondly, it centralizes all my comments on my Google profile tool. You do see what Google is doing right? They are turning the whole web into a social network.”

I of course downloaded it and tried it in a few places, and it’s pretty cool (for someone who likes to engage and comment on stuff even if you don’t care what my opinion is – haha). Here’s what I said on ASAE’s site:

Sorry guys! Just proving a point. I said I love ASAE, but in the same comment I’m promoting YAP as the place for association professionals to go hang out. Now anyone can go to www.asaecenter.org, see the little button on the side that shows there’s a sidewiki comment, and see my comment. You can click on my picture and it will go to my Google profile, where you can see who I am and everything else I’ve commented on.

Here’s another example: I went and commented on my own socialfish.org site. Again, I was the first to comment, so I posted a little welcome message. Now I have no idea if this comment will stay there once other people start commenting, and there doesn’t seem to be a way (yet) to claim your site, but I figure this can’t hurt.

You still reading? Yes, this mean go on, go do it. Go download Sidewiki, and write a welcome comment on your own website before someone else does. Stat!