A new service from Google is reportedly in testing with Google Staff right now, the service is called Google Mine and appears to be a useful tool for tracking and sharing lists of your belongings or collections.
The service will allow you to share lists for things such as DVDs, Gadgets, Shoes, Wishlists and more with your circles on Google+ and allow you to view their lists as well. The description advises :
Google Mine lets you share your belongings with your friends and keep up to date with what your friends are sharing. It enables you to control which of your Google+ Circles you share an item with. It also lets you rate and review the items, upload photos of them and share updates on the Google+ Stream where your friends get to see and comment on them.
The focal point of interactions on Google Mine will of course be Google+ and in keeping with this there will be a lot of sharing options. Google+ allows very granular permissions as to who you share your information with so you will be able to restrict lists to specific people or circles. The full list of interactions will be something like :
- Catalog your belongings, track what you have
- Review your belongings for your friends to see
- Control who sees what, track conversations
- Send requests to borrow or try out friends’ stuff
- Share stuff you wish for, get recommendations
- Share stuff you are giving away, find takers
- Follow, browse, search stuff that friends share
Google Mine is still very much an internal project at Google and to go with the Google+ there is also apparently an Android App in Bazaar – Googles internal Play store – that staff are dogfooding as well.
- The Android app appears to allow full access to the Google+ options
- Search for stuff people have shared on Mine.
- See instant matches for your stuff, and the people in your circles.
- Use What’s Hot to follow what others are sharing.
- Organize and share your stuff as lists.
From this it appears that you can list, loan, give, review any object in your list/collection directly from the Android App. It could also be used to share your gift lists with circles on Google+ from the app.
Of course with this kind of information, Google could ‘Mine’ the data to better target you with advertising and they most probably will, but I personally would have a great use for this service, with my current lists of Gadgets and DVDs just a spreadsheet in Google Docs I would love something like this that allows me to add wishlists and keep track of who has loaned what.
It’s still being internally tested at this stage and with no public announcement or release date we’ll just have to keep watching for further developments.
Would you use a service like this? What would your lists be of?
