Why Is Google Giving Its ‘Shared Stuff’ Feature No Love In Its Social Movement?
Back in September when Google quietly announced a new service called ‘Shared Stuff’ I hailed it as the first step towards a social Google - a potential stealth Del.icio.us-killer that could signal the future of Google Reader.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Google quietly launched Shared Stuff in September 2007, it read as a bookmarking-and-sharing play aimed squarely at Del.icio.us — and possibly as a template for where Google Reader's sharing features were headed. Two months later the company framed a broader social ambition with OpenSocial, and by late December it was reported to be rolling out social features across its services built on Gmail contacts.
The puzzle ParisLemon flags is that none of this adds up to a promoted product: Shared Stuff has had no visible marketing push since launch. For a company whose emergence as a transformative internet force took the industry by surprise, leaving its most explicitly social feature unloved raises the question of whether the social push is strategic or experimental.
First-order effects
- Shared Stuff stays effectively undiscovered: without promotion, the feature competes for attention inside Google's own portfolio — including Reader's sharing — rather than against Del.icio.us in the market.
- The OpenSocial coalition announced in November 2007 now rests on a partner whose flagship consumer-facing social feature is being starved of visibility.
Second-order effects
- Del.icio.us and other bookmarking services face no competitive pressure from an unpromoted challenger, leaving the social-bookmarking market uncontested while Google decides how seriously to commit.
- Publishers and widget developers betting on OpenSocial must price in execution risk: a Google that won't promote its own sharing tool may not drive the distribution partners expected from the platform.
Third-order effects
- If quiet-launch-without-promotion is the pattern, it points to a structural tension at Google between search-driven product logic and the sustained consumer marketing social products require — a test of whether the company can operate outside its distribution comfort zone.
- The alternative reading — that Shared Stuff is deliberately low-key infrastructure feeding Google's social graph via Gmail contacts — would make under-promotion a strategy, with the real contest fought through search and existing services rather than standalone products.
The trend: Google's 2007-2008 social push — Shared Stuff, OpenSocial, Gmail-contact-based features — is shaping up as a test of whether a search-distribution company can build consumer social products, or will keep social as quiet plumbing beneath its core services.