Google Shared Stuff
No, that's not a comment -- it's the name of a new service that Google silently rolled out today that can be found here. Tony Ruscoe on the Google Blogoscoped blog speaks of a new "share" button in Google Video that takes you to the new service.
It’s possible to view the most popular shared stuff, also available filtered by tag and domain, or shared stuff from a particular user. At the moment, many of the shared items are from people testing this service, and I’ve also seen quite a few “adult” links and images in there, so it will be interesting to see how useful these pages are once more people start to share links.
The first thing you will see when you visit the site is a list of "stuff" people you know have shared, and things like the number of times those particular items have been viewed. This is actually quite an interesting idea. Patrick Altoft, whose blog I found using Google Shared Stuff, gives us five reasons that we should all give the new service a try. He brings up a very good point -- it's like signing up for Digg and having 500 real "friends" out of the gate. Unlike most social sites, you don't have to build your network because it already exists through your Gmail contacts.
It's not hard to imagine, if the planets line up, that this service could be a fierce competitor, or "complimentary service", to Digg.