Google breaks their own rules and becomes evil

I miss hoodwink.d.

That said, I am unaware of any uproar over this. Am I living a sheltered life?

This sounds more like what the Web is supposed to be like rather then anyone being evil.

xebidy, do you fear Greasemonkey as well?

I bet it takes less than 255 characters of JavaScript to thwart it if you don't want it on your site.

What an incredibly lazy, link-bait, uninformative, unoriginal headline.

It's about the Google Sidewiki - http://www.google.com/sidewiki/ - released just over a month ago.

Imagine if Google actually did something evil? We'd have to invent a new term for it. This feature could be annoying, sure, but if you're the type of person who installs Google Toolbar that's probably not a big concern. There are many times I would like to be able to publicly flag a site for inaccuracies, outdated information, content theft, or simply say I think this guy is silly and you shouldn't listen to him. I understand why the site would want total control but it's the Internet -- it doesn't work that way. The end user, more or less, has total control over how they want to get information.

Anything that requires a toolbar installed first does not qualify as 'evil', at worst it qualifies as 'stupid' by the user that knows how to download a toolbar but then doesn't know how to disable it.

linkbait + blogspam = flagged.

Question: Does the sidewiki area indicate in any way that it is not part of the website? Does the url bar only show the sites url, or does it also show some indicator of the side wiki?

You mean, in the same way that Hacker News, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc., is evil for allowing side-channel discussions of other people's websites? Give me a break.

Sidebars = Evil?

We've come a long way 'Evil' from Nazis to sidebars....