By having a large enough install base, they just might be the first to actually execute the idea successfully enough to really make it useful. I guess the major

By having a large enough install base, they just might be the first to actually execute the idea successfully enough to really make it useful. I guess the major problem that's always been there with this kinda stuff in the past is that its just so inconvenient. But having it integrated directly into the browser (by default?) kind of axes that qualm -- plus the whole "age of twitter" thing, with our growing habit of blasting updates back and forth about your every moment helps a lot. Allowing your friends to easily join in the conversation can really help you feel like you aren't just shouting into the abyss. The only thing that I still question whenever I see this stuff (including one of my own projects, so maybe I'm biased), is whether or not it meshes with the way we really communicate, and if it fits with the way we'd best want to leave our marks when annotating the web. I mean, its obvious that we'd want to be able to see what's out there in the universe of all available conversations for what we're looking at, but does that mean its best to keep them all in a single stream, which is what it looks like sidewiki wants? And moreover, does that really just boil down into a triviality in implementation details? Or is it something more? Do we need to start re-examining the nature of how we comment? Maybe the single page collection idea works well for blogs and stuff like that because we're more or less being co-ordinated by the original author (and the conversation that grows out of the seed they planted), but when we start annotating, we aren't necessarily going to be discussing things in nearly the same frame as the meme generated by a page at large. Maybe I don't want to talk about missiles on a link dedicated missiles. Maybe there was something in the article that sparked off something tangental (I can't spell, or even tell if that's a real word, sorry) about transportation, or energy, or something that would just be lost if I just let it drip into the chaotic conversation that 4chan drove towards jihad on its sidewiki page. The "implementation detail" way of resolving the issue is just to silo up conversations, but still allow people to find the common root that links them all together, so you don't always start at zero. And that's fine, a page can very easily have a 1-N relationship with its impending streams of thought, just like bit.ly lets links have 1-N shortlinks that pad our individual egos, but still tracks the traffic generated to the destination in aggregate. But what about N-1? N-N? Things start getting really interesting. To me, its interesting on the scale of pagerank.