Google has yet another free service up - Shared Stuff. It’s simple, even by Google’s standards: add a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, and click it when you find something you want to bookmark or share with others. You’ll get the option of saving this site to your personal Shared Stuff profile, email it to someone or bookmark it with some of the existing social bookmarking services, like Delicious or Digg.
A company known for innovation, Google actually walks a well trodden path here. Shared Stuff is a cute app, but Delicious it is not. Furthemore, one would expect such a service to integrate with practically every other Google service, but this is currently not the case.
Don’t get me wrong: Google Shared Stuff does what it does quite well; it won’t replace the tools I already use but it’s nice to know it’s there. Its existence is not meaningless, however; although the response from most bloggers was lukewarm, I don’t see Shared Stuff as a blunder. With Google’s huge user base, it was probably the case of “why not”, anyway.
I like it precisely because of its simplicity and minimalism. Or at least I want to like it, but the bookmarklet needs a ton of work: it doesn’t seem to work in Safari (at least not in WinSafari) and half the time it doesn’t work in Firefox either.
If they fix that (and maybe add an option to edit a share), I’ll probably use it a lot.
I would love to get all over this but it has 3 major problems. You cannot edit entries, which will probably be changed soon, it doesn’t work in firefox well (if you switch back to the main window and then back to the pop up you’ll see a refreshed display…), this must be changed soon, and lastly should have a firefox plugin/icon rather than a bookmark icon… I don’t like the bookmark toolbar. I resolved this by just bringing everything down to bookmark toolbar and hiding the other one.