Google Mine is All Yours.

This weekend, details of a new Google service named “Mine” leaked. Using Google Mine, users will be able to inventory everything they own, share their collections online with others, and even mark items as “free” if they would like to give them away.

The rest of this article pretty much writes itself but I might as well go through the motions.

My first issue with the service is the most obvious; it’s a service that links with Google+. Combined, these two services tell people (a) everything you own, and (b) when you’re not at home. All other issues aside, this doesn’t seem like a very good idea.

A second issue I have with this service is that there’s only one reason for it — so Google will know what you own so that they can better tailor advertisements to you. Of course they already do that based on the things you search and shop for online, but until now they didn’t have any way to do that with the things you own. That’s what Mine allows them to do. Man I would have loved to spied in on that meeting.

“But how can we find out what people own so that we can better market ads to them?”

“I don’t know. Let’s just set up a big empty database and ask people to manually enter that information in for us!”

We live in the “Golden Age of Over Sharing”. We’ve gone from websites to blogs to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to whatever. In 10 seconds with half a dozen touches of my thumb I can take a picture with my phone and share it, along with my current location, with over a thousand people. People share too much, too broadly, too often.

Anyway. My third issue with the service, as someone still reeling from the cancellation of Google Reader, is quite simple: there’s no guarantee that this service will be around forever. In fact, it’s quite possible that once the service stops growing — or more specifically, once it’s not showing a return in advertising revenue — it’ll be cancelled. Somewhere out there right now is a guy who will spend the next year entering every possession he owns, starting when the service launches and ending the day they shut it down.

The idea of maintaining online lists is not unprecedented. Those of us with massive collections of things like video games and action figures have so many items that it’s impossible to remember them all. Unfortunately for Google, those of us faced with that problem already have our own solutions, whether it’s an online database, a spreadsheet maintained on our phones, or a bunch of papers bound in a folder. Some of us even share those lists online — to other collectors, not marketing hounds. I can’t think of anyone who thinks imputing all that information directly into the bowels of Google is a great idea.

Google Mine? It’s all yours, guys.