Google Shared Stuff
Google's social side is more visible every day. A new service called "Shared Stuff" lets you share interesting links with your friends and the entire world. You need to drag a bookmarklet to your browser's link bar or to click on the "Share" button from a web page …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's entry into link-sharing drew unusually broad same-day pickup — TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, Google Blogoscoped and mathewingram.com all covered Shared Stuff on September 20, 2007 — evidence that whether the search leader could build credible social products was already the live debate. The mechanics are deliberately minimal: drag a bookmarklet to the browser bar or click an on-page Share button, then push a link to friends or to the public.
The strategic backdrop is Google's core-business leverage: Hitwise figures show the company holding 63.98 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending September 1, 2007, up seven percent year-over-year. Any sharing feature attached to that franchise starts with a default audience most dedicated bookmarking services could never match.
First-order effects
- Users get a browser-level share mechanism tied to their Google account, and Google gets a stream of declared-interest data — what people actively choose to pass along — that search logs alone never captured.
- Publishers whose pages carry the Share button gain a potential distribution path through Google's user base at essentially zero integration cost.
Second-order effects
- Standalone link-sharing and bookmarking services now face a free competitor distributed alongside the dominant search engine, forcing differentiation on features and community rather than the basic act of saving and forwarding a URL.
Third-order effects
- If Google continues bolting social features onto existing properties instead of building a standalone destination, sharing risks becoming an ambient feature of search infrastructure — leaving rival networks' main defense the social graph Google does not yet own, an outcome that remains genuinely unresolved.
The trend: Search incumbents are absorbing social sharing as a feature of their existing properties, converting each shared link into both a distribution channel and a behavioral-data asset.