Google anyone?

There is one player notably missing from the social bookmarking, and that's Google.

2 years ago there were rumors that Google tried to buy Friendster, and shortly after Google introduced orkut.

Google's Personalized Search, introduced on Nov '05, does bookmarking with tags (oops, labels in Google-talk) as a sidekick. But these tags labels are personal, not "social" - they cannot be shared with the community.

How come?

Either Google believes that its algorithms can do just fine (or be further improved) without the need for human input, or, maybe they believe that they can simply leverage the social tagging done by other non-Google services (which, after all, result in links- the fuel for Google's PageRank algorithm), or maybe something is cooking.

It's interesting to note that Google has a patent that covers certain aspects of social bookmarking:

[0068] In one embodiment, a user may share or overlay bookmarks. For example in one embodiment, a user is able to open up their bookmarks for others to view.

also:

[0069] One embodiment of the present invention fosters community and relationship building. In one embodiment, the search engine is able to recognize clusters or pairs of users having similar interests.

Rumors anyone?

Technorati : google, patent, social bookmarking, web2.0
Del.icio.us : google, patent, social bookmarking, web2.0