Google Mine: don't believe the hype (not all of it, anyway)

This morning a report has surfaced of an service called "Google Mine", one that would allow users to control and keep up-to-date on their belongings (digital and physical) and share them with other users in an easy-to-work-with environment. This system has been claimed to be heading toward the public soon, but in fact such a service – if it does indeed exist – has been tagged "internal Only". In this case, with Google, many such services and apps are in testing all the time, and might never see the light of day.

The code-name Google Mine pre-supposes the idea that you'd be able to collect all of your possessions and add them to a stack – a big ol' hole in the internet where you could keep everything and organize it at will. Therein lies the second meaning of "mine", everything that belongs to you.

What Google Mine is being tagged with here is a paragraph describing a new environment that would – once again – tie together many Google services:

"Google Mine lets you share your belongings with your friends and keep up to date with what your friends are sharing. It enables you to control which of your Google+ Circles you share an item with. It also lets you rate and review the items, upload photos of them and share updates on the Google+ Stream where your friends get to see and comment on them."

Sound like any services you know? The unofficial blog "Google System" notes that this app ecosystem was located in Bazaar, an internal app repository for Google Android employees. This system would collect "gadgets, clothing, electronics, DVDs, cars, bikes or anything!" Allowing these items to be shared, commented upon, and flaunted to no end.

One of the most excellent bits of this spill of information is the idea of a 3D viewer of objects code-named Katamari. The character Katamari Damacy is a little alien from the game by the same name that specializes in rolling up massive amounts of matter to make world-sized balls of oddities. Sounds just like the WebGL solution we're looking for!

So keep this in mind, ladies and gentlemen: Google Mine COULD exist in the future, but at the moment it's not necessarily scheduled for any real release. We can dream, but we should be suitably skeptical about the whole mess.