Using Google Shared Stuff

Last week Google launched a link sharing service, not unlike what many social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, digg and magnolia is trying to do. Built on the same idea that makes these other services work, Google Shared Stuff is all about the idea of the wisdom of the crowds, although at this point it focuses more on the more personal aspect of the user sharing interesting links he or she found on the internet.

To get started, point your browser to http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/stuff. If you are not logged in to your Google account, here you will see popular items shared by all Google Shared Stuff users, but if you’re logged in, the page will display the Shared Stuff from people in your Google contact list. You can still see the popular items shared by other Google users by going to the “global” popular items page.

Sharing links can be done through a bookmarklet which you can add to your Bookmarks. And based on the only Google Shared Stuff help page, it also seems like Google will be adding a Sharing button on many of its sites, and they will probably allow other site owners to do the same too.

This is what you see when you’re sharing an item:

It allows you to add the page to your Shared Stuff, email it to any of your Gmail contacts, or use a third party bookmarking sites to share. In the share tab, you can put in a comment about the page you’re sharing, and put tags to that shared item. At last Google is now calling them tags, and not labels. A thumbnail preview of the page will be added to the shared item by default, though you can turn this off.

There’s also a profile section on the right side of your shared stuff page which you can customize with links and other fields. For your profile picture, you can use picasaweb as a source. This is a nice integration point of the service. Below your profile are links to your shared stuff’s RSS feed and an Add to Google button. When viewing your own shared stuff page, you can also see links to your Google contacts who have shared stuff too.

You can view shared stuff by tags or by domain, which at this point shows a global sample, cannot be filtered using your contacts yet.

Google Shared stuff looks is a move in the direction of integrating all the company’s services and they’re doing it in a social way of things. It’s about time that Google acknowledge the power of the social.