ReadWriteWeb

Google hunters ferreted out a new feature late last night called Google Shared Stuff. The project is obviously far from ready to ship - but it's too late to squabble about that now! I've got high hopes for social bookmarking in general but this particular project may not be worth your time to check out just yet. To save you the time I've kicked the tires and offer below some of the best and worst things about Google Shared Items so far. In the end I've got some thoughts about what Google could do with this service to make it the best social bookmarking service available.

The Good News

There are a number of things that Google has done well already. It's hard not to compare this product to Del.icio.us in particular, the Yahoo! acquired product that most people would agree currently dominates the social bookmarking world.

Daniel Langendorf at last100 has written an outstanding post, explaining how (if done right) the Gphone and not the iPhone will be the one to change the face of the wireless industry.

The post has accompanying graphics - Gphone concepts contributed by Lorin Wood, a previsualization designer who specializes in concepts and ideation for Hollywood. Wood’s concepts for last100 explored how Google applications, and its advertising, might look like on the Gphone.

Here's a taste of what Dan wrote, but I recommend you click through to read the whole thing:

Recently Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, has been throwing out warning signals about the Internet. He told the BBC that poor security and poor software design are undermining the reliability of the internet. In particular he mentioned Operating Systems and browsers:

"The biggest hole we have is with internet browsers, because we have too much access to the functionality of the operating system,‚Ä? he said, explaining that this made it easy to be infected by viruses and ‚ÄúTrojans‚Ä?, malicious programs that can be used to take control of a computer.

While Vint Cerf isn't worried these days about the Internet collapsing due to a lack of capacity in the physical infrastructure, he is concerned that "software bugs – such as the problems that brought the internet phone service Skype to its knees last week – coupled with poor security could cause big problems."

In another media report, from the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Vint Cerf warns that all the information currently stored on the web could be lost to future generations. He is quoted as saying:

The Google Operating System blog noted that Sun's StarOffice suite of productivity tools has been added to the free Google Pack offering. StarOffice is a direct competitor to Microsoft Office, as it is a full suite of desktop-based office apps that normally retails for $70. It includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database. It has support for most Microsoft Office formats, except for the formats introduced in Office 2007. It is however only available to Windows users.

As Google Operating System pointed out, Google is not using OpenOffice; an open source project sponsored by Sun based on StarOffice's source code, released in 2000. GOS states that "the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org [is] that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration."

As part of our Personalizing Google Week, we conducted an email interview with Google's Sep Kamvar, who is Lead Software Engineer for Personalization at Google. Sep was the founder of Kaltix, a search engine that was acquired by Google in 2003 and is thought to be the basis of Google's current personalization efforts.

Here is our interview, with questions derived from a number of the R/WW authors:

R/WW: In a general sense, do you think privacy is less important now than it used to be - due to the popularity of social networks and social software? Because it does seem that to achieve true personalization, some sacrifices need to be made in terms of privacy (note: we're not getting at Google here, but in terms of web technology it is a noticeable trend these days).

Sep: Even despite the current trends, it is incredibly important to design products with the utmost respect for user data and we do this in the following ways:

It wouldn't truly be "Google Personalization" week if we didn't talk about iGoogle. After all, it is the epitome of personalization for Google. It was their fastest growing product in 2006 and is available in 40 countries and 26 languages. Formerly known as Google Personalized Homepage or the abbreviated Google IG, iGoogle is a personalized AJAX start page.

In Greg Linden's guest post defining Web personalization, he notes that Google Personalized Search uses technology acquired in 2003 from a small startup named Kaltix. He goes on to say that "the current version of Google Personalized Search learns from your search queries. Searchers do not have to do anything explicitly to use it; it is all implicit. The current Google Personalized Search likely is using the same Kaltix technology, building a high-level profile of you, then biasing all of your search results based on your long-term behavior."

With that in mind, it's curious that just under half (48%) of respondents in this week's R/WW poll haven't noticed any difference in their Google search results. Only 12% have seen an improvement, but perhaps of more concern is that 9% say their search results have gotten worse! You can test this yourself by going to googlonymous, which as the name suggests allows you to do an anonymous search on Google (hat tip Mind Booster Noori for the link).

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently at the Seoul Digital Forum and he was asked to define Web 3.0 by an audience member. After first joking that Web 2.0 is "a marketing term", Schmidt launched into a great definition of Web 3.0. He said that while Web 2.0 was based on Ajax, Web 3.0 will be "applications that are pieced together" - with the characteristics that the apps are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the apps can run on any device (PC or mobile), the apps are very fast and very customizable, and are distributed virally (social networks, email, etc).

Here is Schmidt's full answer via a YouTube video uploaded by Seokchan (Channy) Yun (via Orli Yakuel):

Guest article by Greg Linden, founder of personalized news service Findory and author of Geeking with Greg.

Google has received much attention, not all of it positive, for its efforts to personalize search.

In this article, I will briefly describe personalized search, why Google and other search engines are trying to do personalized search, the approach Google is taking toward personalized search, and other approaches to personalized search.

What is personalized search?

Personalized search is showing different search results to different people. Personalized search uses each searcher's past behavior to try to understand intent and what is relevant to that searcher.

This week we're opening a file on Google's efforts towards personalization, a trend that has become very apparent in Google over the past year. As we did with Yahoo last week, we'll publish a number of feature articles looking at how Google is implementing personalization into its products - and how it effects you, the user.

We mentioned in our Half-Year Web Technology Report that Google has impressed so far in 2007, on both the acquisition front and building up its own technology. Equally impressive is that Google is not sitting back and letting the hundreds of alternative search engines overtake them in technology. Often incumbent tech companies are content to sit on their market position and so they don't innovate much further. However Google has busily been experimenting with, and implementing into its main search properties, new types of personalization.

In January we ran a poll asking which "Search 2.0" approaches stood the best chance of beating Google. Personalized Search was the option that got the most votes. Also our interview with Google's Matt Cutts revealed that Google has been experimenting with personalization a lot over the past year or so.