Google Adds Shared Stuff, Inches Closer to New Social Network
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | September 20, 2007 | Share This
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Google just launched a new service called Google Shared Stuff. It’s basically another bookmarklet that lets you easily save items while you browse the web, but the emphasis is on sharing. From TechCrunch:
Shared Stuff is simple enough; users drag a “email/ share” button into their browser, and click it when they want to add pages to their Shared Stuff profile. Links can include an image, text extract, and/ or a user comment. The results can then be viewed directly, via iGoogle or RSS. An interesting addition is the option to use Shared Stuff to post links to other social booking sites as well, including Facebook, Furl, Delicious, Reddit and Digg.
Digg also just went social, adding user profiles and the ability for users to “shout” stories at each other, and they’re promising more features soon. But Google’s Shared Stuff includes a profile option, too, and though Shared Stuff is being met with tepid reviews, it does look a lot like Google’s actually bringing together its first rumored social network (I won’t count Orkut).
One big question is, what implications does this have for search? Tony Ruscoe at Google Blogoscoped thinks:
With Google tracking how often a link is shared and viewed, it will be interesting to see whether this data is used by their ranking algorithms, especially since users are asked to tag their shared items.
And Ramblings About SEO addresses this as well:
Keeping in mind all the recent discussion about using more and more signals about page and site quality, it seems likely that this service will be another way that Google can determine whether or not a page is a quality page. If lots of users share your page(s), then these [can] be considered votes for your page and site.
Besides SEO, I wonder if Google Shared Stuff likely also provides more ammo for Google’s personalized search arsenal.
Topics: Google, Search: Innovations, Social Media |
Sepideh, This is very similar to http://shareaholic.com