You may have heard that Google is launching a social bookmarking-type service today, called Google Shares. Loads of coverage from the usual suspects, most of whom aren’t all that impressed, as its a pretty unsophisticated service that “even” allows you to bookmark *other* socially driven sites like Del.icio.us amongst other sites.

What’s the bloody point in all of this?

Is this yet-another half-baked Google product that is doomed to mediocrity? I think that we won’t really know until it all pans out, but in this case, I think its an issue of Google creating something that is quite deliberately a “me-too” type product.

Usually these fail. But this just isn’t “any” company — this is Google, the 900 lb Gorrila that only needs to break wind to turn Steve Ballmer into a quivering mass of incoherent insults (although, granted, it doesn’t take much to do that).

No, I think Google will probably do just fine in copying many features as it finds necessary, and then rolling it out quietly between its users who are also, quietly, using iGoogle, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Docs, and Picasa. While it _could_ do so, I don’t think Google needs to do anything extra other than keep up with other social news / bookmarking features, and keep itself at parity.

And let the non-early adopters who are familiar with Google to start having fun with this service, as it can probably be integrated fairly easily into its own suite of products.

Another rosy-glasses way to look at it is that by joining the social bookmarking / news group, particularly as you’ll be able to share stuff from other social sites, is that it will increase awareness *of* these other sites as well.

You know what they say about a rising tide and all that.

So, yes, you might think that Google Shares is “meh”. And it might be. But I don’t think Google’s really worried about it at this point, for a whole bunch of reasons. And even if it doesn’t really evolve into a killer product, there are reasons for _that_ as well.