Sep

20

Google’s Shared Stuff Reinvents the Google Notebook for No Good Reason

September 20, 2007 |

Unexpectedly, Google has released a new product called “Shared Stuff.” It’s a slightly weird name for a social bookmarking product.

It’s still rather basic, as you can’t really tag the pages, just add comments. There is, however, a lot of potential in this product. It could become a reddit/digg competitor in the long run. So far, you can add a very simple profile page (here is mine) and not much more.

One interesting feature is that it allows you to also bookmark a page to other services such as delicious, digg, reddit, facebook and social poster.

What is also weird, is that it isn’t integrated with my Google Reader Shared items. That integration would make “Shared Stuff” so much more useful.

Matthew Ingram find’s this weird, as well:

I also found it odd — as Ian Betteridge does — that Google’s new sharing service doesn’t integrate items that are shared with Google Reader, but perhaps that is coming. Radioactive Yak and others believe this could be the first piece of Google’s rumoured “Maka-maka” social net.

I was thinking about one thing, though. I am already a pretty heavy user of the Google Notebook, one of those many Google products that only a few people use, but which are very useful. If they had just added a function to share items in an RSS feed to that, they would have a far more powerful product. Actually, it does output an RSS feed. The sharing function is a bit hidden, but here it is. Or did Google forget it even owns the Google Notebook?

It seems going social is the thing to do today, so it makes sense for Google to go down that route as well. Now if Google would just go ahead and integrate all those puzzle pieces together…

Technorati tags: ,


Share This

Related Posts

Comments