First Sidewiki; now real time spam

I just finished reading Rae Hoffman’s post in the Outspoken Media blog about Google’s new real time search inclusion of Tweets.  Now tweets deemed relevant to a keyword search appear at the top of the SERP evidently assigning huge value to recency in the algorithm.  Hoffman does an excellent job of outlining why this is scary as hell.  Really, everyone should read it.

The story reminded me of the  Google Sidewiki launch.  That new service by Google allows anyone to post a comment about anyone else’s website.  If you have the Sidewiki tool on your browser you can view the posts left by everyone else over time.  It’s a potential nightmare for folks interested in having their website represent their best foot forward.  I posted about this issue a while back, and can understand the challenge of blending the internet value of “transparency” with the marketer’s desire to influence brand sentiment.  But the tone-deafness of Google in how (now two) products have been released is troubling.

The lack of sensitivity reflected by these launches is alluded to in Ken Auletta’s book, Googled.  (Here’s a review of the book) He attributes it to an extreme engineer’s mindset.  This may or may not be true, but my concern is that as Google marches on toward controlling more and more of our experience on the web, there will be more and more of these missteps that place our privacy and security at increasingly greater risk.

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