Google is a company that just can’t stop Innovating. In the past two weeks the web giant has released not one but two headline grabbing products.

First up is Google Sidewiki.  A product that drives home the point that bloggers, discussion groupies , YouTubers and  Tweeters  now have more control over the publics perception of a brand than the website owner.  How is this true you may ask? Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where users can read and write entries along the side of the page. Google then ranks Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries.

This kind of functionality has been available in a number LMSs for some time but never has the general public had such control or influence over someone else’s piece of content.

Google’s second product is Google Wave.  Wave has obtained unparalleled levels of hype. So what is it? Basically email 2.0. It’s a well known problem that emails break down as a collaboration tool when more than two people are in on the conversation.

Wave is real-time chat as well as a platform for editing documents collaboratively. It can also be used as a Wiki, to replace email and IM within an organisation, or just to organise a pub crawl. Wave feels oddly familiar, it has the Google’s typical simple design, yet it also represents an alien concept for many users, as it combines so many aspects of social software into one extremely flexible package but still remains deceptively simple to use.

Sidewiki is really simple idea and with time allot of people will see it as a part of the webpage; Wave is a fantastic start but as yet seems too bleeding edge for the masses.  If Google continues its “release early and release often” strategy they will have a market leading service on their hands.