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Google's new sharing tool: give it time

Posted 10 October 2007 at 8:40AM by Simon Dickson in Doing business online

I haven't seen much coverage of Google Shared Stuff, the latest tool to emerge from the company's laboratories - and what I have seen hasn't been very positive. But give it time.

For most people, if they want to tell friends about the great thing they just found on the web, they fire off an email. But let's face it, the last thing we all need is more email. The 'web 2.0' way is to create an account on one of the many 'sharing' sites. When you sign up, you get a page which lists the items you've 'tagged' recently, allowing people to follow the things you've found interesting.

We've had buttons for sharing items on sites like Digg and del.icio.us on our pages since day one; and they're starting to appear on mainstream sites like BBC News. Plus, don't discount the fact that Facebook - now bigger in the UK than MySpace (see this PDF) - has a sharing function.

I really wanted to like Google's product - but for whatever reason, I simply can't get it to work, in either Firefox or Internet Explorer. In this first release, it works using a 'bookmarklet': a super-powered bookmark/favorite which you have to add manually into a browser toolbar. It's a very clunky approach, and compares very badly to the competition: both del.icio.us and Facebook have excellent Firefox extensions, for example. Get past that hurdle, and others have complained that some functionality isn't yet working properly.

But despite all these initial complaints, there's a bigger picture here. Imagine how it could integrate into other Google products: like Google Reader, like Gmail, like Google's browser toolbar. Imagine if it could look at the stuff you like, and introduce you to people with similar interests. Even more powerfully, imagine how it could be used to influence the search result rankings: the more people identify a certain page or site as 'worth sharing', the higher it would appear.

So let's not get ahead of ourselves. Yes, it's a bit rubbish. But it hasn't been formally launched by Google: you won't even see it listed on their Labs page. And whilst it's a long way from deposing the leaders in the field, the potential is huge.

Tags: delicious, digg, facebook, firefox, google, sharing

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