Social Media Strategies and Technologies

Google announced their SideWiki project - which allows people to comment on any web page/site’s as they visit to share, read insights from others and be part of the conversations related to that page. What is really interesting to know is that, the content influential game (What is good on web?) is driven by online users/consumers than just Page Ranking algorithms of search engines.

Jeremiah Owyang outlined some excellent points on what this means to corporates and websites?.

Here are my thoughts [ as posted on Jeremiah blog as a comment]:

This is an expected move after Google’s failed attempt to encourage people to comment on search results to improve the accuracy, relevancy and most importantly adding the people rank to content on web instead of just page/keyword ranks.

While this kind of technology gives consumers an edge in aggregating their opinions there by influencing the decisions (both positive and negative) at large extent apart from driving the search engine rankings for the content on web.

However the most important thing in my opinion – If SideWiki becomes successful then Google will be less dependent on services like Twitter, Social Sharing/Ranking Sites for serving the Recent & Relevant content in search results and most importantly their search rankings will move from keywords based algorithm to people & engagement rankings so Google can stand against the growing trend of social news/sharing/ranking sites, which aggregate popular content based on people rankings and all these services are steadily increasing their user base.

EConsultancy has put blog post on early use of Google SideWiki by people and it’s worth reading.

What do you think?.