New Google Stuff

Wow, first colored labels now all this. Google has been busy lately!

Google Knol: an author-driven, Wikipedia competitor, Knol, which stands for a unit of knowledge, will be the core unit of the project, and is, essentially, just a webpage. People who know a particular subject are encouraged to write an authoritative article about it. Editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. Knols on a particular subject will be the first topic that appears when someone does a search for that information. Hmmm…does this mean Google search will favor its own products in the search results? Also, do we really need this? Isn’t Wikipedia already available? And there’s Mahalo too.

Google Profiles: Google Profiles have just been introduced. The profile is “simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.”

Google Reader & Talk Shared Items: Google Reader and Google Talk (aka “chat” in Gmail) have been linked up to make shared Reader items available to Google Talk buddies. You can see your friends’ shared items in Reader’s left-hand navigation area under “Friends’ shared items.” Looks like my friends have to be GTalk users (or Gmail users, since that has chat) for this to work. Even though I’m subscribed to a friend’s shared Google Reader’s feeds, his “shared items” didn’t appear under my Friends list since he doesn’t use Gmail/GTalk. Bummer.