Back in September when Google quietly announced a new service called ‘Shared Stuff’ I hailed it as the first step towards a social Google – a potential stealth Del.icio.us-killer that could signal the future of Google Reader. While it may have been the first of Google’s social steps, and it may have also led to Google Reader’s new social features, one can’t help but wonder: has Google forgotten all about it now?

While technically ‘Shared Stuff‘ and Google Reader’s ‘Shared Items’ are different in that one allows you to share any page you find on the Internet while the other only allows you to share RSS feed items, it seems like an obvious move to merge them together. I in fact suggested as much in my original post, yet Google seems content to keep them separate – and worse, let ‘Shared Stuff’ go on basically unused.

How unused is it? Well if the ‘Top Shared Stuff‘ page is any indication, the “most shared” item has 10 people sharing it – compare this with Del.icio.us which gets thousands and tens of thousands of people sharing their most shared items. Furthermore, clicking on some of these users, most only have one or two items ’shared’ total. ‘Shared Stuff’ also allows you to see shared items from people you know – just as Google Reader now allows you to do – yet not surprisingly, no one I know has shared anything recently so the page is blank.

So why no love from Google for ‘Shared Stuff’? Well it could very well be that they are planning to eventually integrate it with Google Reader whether that be in Google Reader itself or on something like a Google Profile page under a ’shared’ tab. Imagine a Google ‘Sharing’ service where you could easily share both RSS feed items and webpages alike depending on if you happened to be browsing the web or reading your feeds. This could be the ultimate sharing/tagging/bookmarking service – a true Del.icio.us killer.

There is something else Google Reader can take from ‘Shared Stuff’: the aforementioned ‘Top Shared Stuff’ page. This is something I’ve long said Google Reader needs – and I think will get – but why implement it on ‘Shared Stuff’ – a service they seem content to let no one use – and not on Google Readers’ ‘Shared Items’? What are they waiting for? The term ‘Digg-killer’ gets thrown around entirely too much, but such functionality in Google Reader might actually carry weight.

While we wait to see if Google stops neglecting ‘Shared Stuff’, there is an easy work-around to manually merge yours and others’ ‘Shared Stuff’ into Google Reader as there is a feed for each user’s page. You could then tag and even opt to share this feed if you wanted in Google Reader.

You can find my ‘Shared Stuff’ feed here, tricky to find unless you already knew my user name was the Google-assigned 10775348759636856492 – yet another aspect Google should probably work on to make their social services more social-friendly.