/ajax:voteforitem/250(12) 250Deciding which projects to spend my free time on got a little easier today. I just found out, five months late, that Google has a new product that obviates and improves on a project I'd been working on:
On September 20, 2009, I checked in the first change for a project I called "Offsites"
Three days later, Google announced "Sidewiki"
Five months later (today), I found out about Sidewiki
To be honest, the last real work I did on Offsites was in November, but I was still excited about it. Offsites and Sidewiki are both "web annotation" products: browser extensions that let you share information about any webpage with other visitors to that page, taking control of information away from website operators and putting it in the hands of users. I started on the project because, according to my research, all of the previous attempts were either total garbage or, in one case, had closed up shop long ago for dubious legal reasons. Unfortunately, I stopped paying attention once I started working on it, which seemed reasonable; it had been several years since the last serious effort. The idea has tons of potential, in my opinion: I always find myself in the long tail of the web needing some little bit of information, like "has this page moved? if so, where?", and "what isn't this website telling me?".
My implementation, Offsites, was as quick and dirty as I could make it: a copy of MediaWiki modified to allow URLs as page names, and browser extensions (firefox and chrome) that show an icon in the URL bar to indicate whether the "offsite" for a page already exists, as determined through an ajax query, and which open a tab for the offsite when clicked.
Sidewiki support has been added to Chrome and Google Toolbar, which already have a huge installed base. It shows the supplemental information about a page in a panel on the left side of the window, and rather than a regular editable wiki page it works more like a list of comments by users, ordered by some algorithm. All really solid decisions.
Unfortunately, there's no doubt that Google has an insurmountable advantage here, or at least one great enough to reduce my likelihood of success enough to not make Offsites worth the effort. If Sidewiki had some fatal flaw, then I don't see it, and it wouldn't be like Google to ship a product with a such a problem. On the bright side, this frees me up to work on other projects. /ajax:getreplytoitemform/250/250/250%3A250<reply>
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