Tony Ruscoe over at Google Blogoscoped has found out that Google has released a new social link sharing service called Google Shared Stuff. If you have a Google account, this service allows you to get started simply by dragging Google’s Email / Share button onto the bookmark toolbar in your browser.
Once there, all you need to do is click on the button to share any given web page that you have gone to. You can enter a description and tags for each article. One intriguing thing that the service does is that it tries to find a representative image on the web page to include with the data you enter it manually.
You can email the profile to others directly from the service, or you can post it to other bookmarking/sharing oriented services, including Facebook, Furl, del.icio.us, Social Poster, Reddit, and Digg.
Users can also subscribe to a feed for your Shared Stuff. This can be a direct RSS feed, or you can add it to their Google home page, or to Google Reader.
Keeping in mind all the recent discussion about using more and more signals about page and site quality, it seems likely that this service will be another way that Google can determine whether or not a page is a quality page. If lots of users share your page(s), then these are considered votes for your page and site.
What remains a mystery is the plans for a real public unveiling of the service.
