23 Musings

Interesting one this... A friend just sent me this url which takes you to a new service from Google called Shared Stuff. At first glance it looks like a Delicious'esque social bookmarking tool, in fact that's exactly what it looks like.

Shared Stuff is really easy to use. Drag an 'email/share' button to your browser toolbar and start clicking when on a page you want to share. Links can include images and text extracts and also comments. You can view the resulting page directly or RSS it or even iGoogle it. You can also cross post from Shared Stuff to services such as Delicious, Furl or Facebook. You can invite people to view your Shared Stuff by email and Gmail contacts can view too.

Now why would Google go to the trouble of creating a 'me too' app (something they're not that known for?

Now, think a bit deeper about this tool and how it could relate to other Google apps and services. Shared docs, spreadsheets, email, web searches, Google gadgets, links, news etc etc. Clearer? Makes sense to me, this could (potentially) become the way users really collaborate and share not just bookmarks (as this looks now) but also all other Google services. It's all very well integrated and could become a real hub for collaboration (if they've thought of that). Of course it could just be Google bookmarks Mk2...