Google Wants You To Share Stuff.

Google has entered the social bookmarking market with a new product called Shared Stuff (http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/stuff).
Shared Stuff is simple enough; users drag a “email/ share” button into their browser, and click it when they want to add pages to their Shared Stuff profile. Links can include an image, text extract, and/ or a user comment. The results can then be viewed directly, via iGoogle or RSS. An interesting addition is the option to use Shared Stuff to post links to other social booking sites as well, including Facebook Furl, Delicious, Reddit and Digg.
Friend can be invited by email, and bookmarks made by Gmail contacts using the service can be viewed as well.
Google Blogscoped suggests that bookmarks can be searched as well, via tag or url, although the feature wasn’t immediately evident on the site when I visited it.
Google already has a bookmarking service (Google Bookmarks) so it’s not clear whether this is an experiment that may later be rolled into that product, or is planned as a long term stand alone site. Overall it’s not the most amazing service; after all social bookmarking sites have been around for a long time and mostly one service appears the same as another, however with Google running the site it always has the opportunity to go well.

Source (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/20/google-wants-you-to-share-stuff/)

Google is going to be the ultimate track-down method of choice for anyone trying to find anyone in no time flat. As if they weren't already with phone number / address listings on Google and Google Earth, too.

Personally I'm keeping my privacy as much as possible. For instance: I've got a blog but my name doesn't appear on my homepage (or anywhere else in it) because of the Google factor. It's intended just for those who recieve personal emails from me to surf to and read - not just anyone who remembers my name and wants to Google it and read it without being a part of the audience I have chosen.

So I think I'll avoid this new service for a while. It's not a matter of paranoia - it's a matter of personal choice for privacy, period. But for those who dig this sort of thing it sounds like it would open up doors for them online in terms of information sharing. Just be careful who you let in.

I was just thinking that this would be a great way for the MPAA/RIAA and/or Feds, NSA, etc. to find pirates and "potential threats". Since Google keeps statistics on every search ever made by any IP indefinitely.

Does this "Shared Stuff" also coinside or work with "Google Desktop"? i was just rescently asked to upgrade a program i had and it also installed the desktop.. is this 1 in the same? ive been leary to use it since i installed it