Google Reader Friend's Shared Items.

Now Google reduced the effort of mailing shared items link !. It would be nice if it gets the friends from Orkut as well.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/reader-and-talk-are-friends.html

Google Knol

It is quite a surprise news from google. There are lot of articles discussing about the same. I find the following two articles interesting.

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2007/12/how-not-tospecial-knolgoogle-edition.cfm

http://www.krishworld.com/blog/open-source/open-media/wikipedia-is-safe-from-google-knol/

The advantages of Knol over Wikipedia are, it clearly defines the owner of an article and it provides a proper monetization platform. The former clearly differentiates between these two approaches. The later problem can be fixed and it should be as the current way of monetization for Wikipedia can't sustain.

It is an interesting move from Google. If you miss the recent blog post about assessment of Google-Yahoo results, you can read it here. Another goal of the project might be to collect more interests of user. I mean, as rating system is present in Knol, Google can precisely know which articles, style of writing etc hence they can better serve the ads for users as well. Google may further extend it and provides social networking functionality.

Yahoo tried to gather collective wisdom of crowd through Yahoo Answers and it replaced discussion forums, newsgroups etc and now Google have even bigger plans and trying to replace Wikipedia !!.

About Google's New Interface

Google's new interface is better than earlier versions. Especially the top bar. It would have been nice if Google would have made the following changes to its interface.

The new interface makes the themed personalized home pages (aka iGoogle) looks very ugly. It looks horrible for certain themes. Instead of the white color for all themes they can blend the color with the theme.
It is good to see links to, images, video, news etc on the bar right above the results. On the first impression i thought they were tabs. Instead they are just links pointing to various Google services. It would have been nice if they could have provide tabs. Because of this, the new interface become useless. Why i think so is, earlier also we have an option by clicking the more. I did not find any major advantage by providing the links above. Because, now, if i click on any of these links it will take to corresponding web site. Users as such do not have major advantage by just providing links. I can not compare the results simultaneously across different services because of this.