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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Jack Schofield

Google Shared Stuff slips out, disappoints

Google has sort-of-not-really-released a new feature, Shared Stuff, via a little "share" button on Google video pages.

Clicking the Share button summons a pop-up that offers three choices: Share, Email and More. The Share section lets you add the Web page to your "My Shared Stuff page" and make it "publicly visible". You can also add a comment. The More button provides "More ways to share this page" including Facebook, Furl, Delicious and Reddit.

You can add a Share button to your browser, so you can use the feature with any Web page.

The independent Google Operating System blog has pictures that show how it works.

However, as several comments have pointed out, Shared Stuff looks like a blatant rip-off of Bzzter!, and uses the same icon. [From here, as hauntedtapedeck says in a comment.] However, there are lots of services that do the same thing, or something similar. Yahoo's Delicious is probably the most obvious.

Read/Write Web has a brief review of the good and bad points of the Google offering, but it's pretty bad. As Marshall Kirkpatrick says: "The worst thing about Google Shared Items is that it doesn't really work." His other complaints include: "There's no integration with Google Reader Shared Items," "There's no data export," and "The metadata is a mess. The RSS feeds look awful."

Google's entire strategy is based on doing things that other people have been doing for years, but doing them better (search, Gmail, Gtalk, maps etc). Shared Stuff still has some way to go.

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