Google keeps on adding and testing new features for its Chrome browser. Things like extensions and Chrome for Mac are still missing, although available if you are adventurous and install Chromium, the open-source project for Google Chrome. Chromium has beta and development features that Google is testing before adding to the Chrome browswer.

Chromium got a new feature, as it occassionally does, but this one definitely caught our eye. The Chromium team announced the addition of bookmark syncing in the developer’s build of Chromium. The new feature will let you keep the same set of bookmarks on multiple machines as well as store them in your Google Docs. This is not unlike the very popular Firefox extension Xmarks.

Here’s how Google explained the new addition, as well as how to implement it:

As of today’s dev channel build, we’re adding a brand new feature to Google Chrome: bookmark sync. Many users have several machines, one at home and one at work for example. This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access.

To activate this feature, launch Google Chrome with the –enable-sync command-line flag. Once you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will then upload and store your bookmarks in your Google Account. Anytime you add or change a bookmark, your changes will be sent to the cloud and immediately broadcast to all other computers for which you’ve activated bookmark sync (using the same XMPP technology as Google Talk).

A note: the Chromium Dev version is the least stable of the Chromium browsers. Windows can crash, new features can need tweaks, and we may never see bookmark syncing ever reach Google Chrome itself. However, this new feature still tickles our fancy, so if you’re brave, subscribe to the dev channel and get the update.

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Google’s data-crunching ways found that the majority of Gmail users aren’t actually using the webmail service’s labels. Starting today, those label names get higher placement, and drag-and-drop labeling aims to make Gmail’s labels more like familiar email folders.

By placing users’ own labels higher up on the left-hand sidebar, right below the main Inbox/Starred/Sent/Drafts/All Mail destinations, Gmail admits that keeping them in their own box, stuck underneath the chat widget, implied they weren’t that important before. Fixes like those contained in Gina’s Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension and the “Go to label” keyboard shorcut in Gmail’s Labs section helped, but now labels are easier to reach, and kept more at the front of your email-clearing mind.

The three labels you use most are automatically shown below your main links, with the rest accessible from an “X more” drop-down. You can add more labels to your shown list, however, by clicking the downward-facing arrow next to a label and choosing “Show label.”

Those higher-up labels are also a boon to frequent mouse users, as you can now click and drag single email messages, or multiple selected messages, onto a label to “move” it into that label (kind of like a folder, no?), or drag the label onto the messages to, uh, label them.

All these features and functionality will be “rolling out gradually” to Gmail users.

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Larry Page and Eric Schmidt from Google did a double header interview from the Google Zeitgeist conference just outside of London today. But the real question on our lips was what is Google going to do about the astounding buzz around realtime search and Twitter?

During a press conference I asked the question of of of Google’s executives, and the answer came back that “the kind of innovation like what Twitter is doing and what we’re doing is increasing search speed, relevance , freshness and comprehensiveness. Other companies will come up with solutions of course.”

Not a great answer.

Luckily, Loic Le Meur is also here and put Larry on the spot on stage, and captured this:

I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime.

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If Google had managed to acquire Facebook back when Yahoo failed to do so, Google would truly dominate the online referral business. But it appears that Google and Yahoo really missed the boat on the social end of the spectrum.

As MySpace crumbles, the decision of Google executives not to purchase the social network incredibly cheap in 2005 is looking better than it once did—though that $900 million search deal didn’t work out so well, either; Google spent three times as much money to deliver ads to MySpace than it would have cost to buy it earlier.

But Facebook is a different animal. Yahoo saw its potential early, offering a cool billion to a young CEO reluctant to sell (or attend early morning negotiations for that matter, according to some reports). It’s hard to know what price would have pushed Mark Zuckerberg over the mattress edge, but two years or so ago it would have been exponentially cheaper than now, with 200 million users to leverage.

But it’s not so much audience size that makes Facebook valuable (though that’s a huge part of it), and it’s certainly not the ease of monetization. It’s the social network’s innate ability to refer traffic, which is essentially at the heart of Google’s own power.

Perhaps few paid much attention when metrics firms reported Facebook drove more traffic to Perez Hilton’s celebrity website than Google, but what about a site like the Huffington Post? Ryan Spoon, web entrepreneur and former eBayer, reports Facebook directs 18.6 percent of HuffPo’s 13 million visitors. Google refers just 11.6 percent.

ryanspoon.com

Aside from one, the other top referrers are either search or social: Yahoo (5.16%), Digg (4.43%), and NyTimes.com (2.5%). Collectively, social sites drive almost a quarter of HuffPo’s traffic, compared to 16 percent for search engines. Obviously, search and social together approach half. If Google had ponied up early to get Facebook, Google would be sending close to a third of that traffic over, as Spoon points out, part algorithmically and part socially.

Perhaps it was the constant threat of antitrust action that kept Google at bay, perhaps it was simply a missed opportunity. Regardless, it gives webmasters a lot to think about, specifically, now that SEO is rather standard, how to leverage Facebook’s power as a traffic generator.

Spoon notes HuffPo creates viral content that encourages Facebookers to share. Creating something people want to share is an art in itself, and certainly HuffPo benefits from its newsy, political nature. But how could a different kind of business target this group that spans several demographics?

Obviously, the information Facebook has on its users is a goldmine the social network isn’t expressly permitted to mine for privacy reasons, though they can feasibly offer general demographic information. But we’re not talking advertising so much as we are content people appreciate enough to spread around.

There’s no one answer to this, but just as a general direction, people like quirky trivia. A blog post, or better maybe, a well-wrought press release to a news organization or popular blogger, could be just the ticket.

Say, for example, a shoe seller issues ten interesting facts about the history of shoes. Even better: Conduct a small experiment with a sample of people who agree to have their movements tracked and publish walking maps of where those shoes go, how many miles are walked, etc. That may be just the kind of thing people find interesting.

For marketers, the possibilities for social marketing are nearly limitless. For Google and what are now traditional search engines, the possibilities may be surprisingly full of limits.

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A lot of people use Google Reader as their primary RSS feed reader, so you’d think its social features would be extremely popular. But they’re really kind of lame, and extremely underpowered. And Google knows this, that’s why it’s continually shifting the way it presents the social elements. The latest change today allows users to more easily find and share with friends of friends. That is to say, if you have a friend sharing an item with you, and another one of their friends comments on it, you can now get access to that friend.

This idea isn’t really anything new, in fact, FriendFeed (aka the primary source of Facebook’s innovations these days), has been doing something similar for a couple of years now. The reason for doing this is obvious: If you don’t have a lot of friends on a service, the friend of a friend element pipes more content into your stream to make things more active, and thus, more appealing to use. But FriendFeed is doing this much better than Google Reader is, so far.

Trying the new functionality out, it seems a bit weird that I would be asked if I want to share my updates with a certain person who I probably don’t know. Instead, wouldn’t it be better to have the option to see their updates? Of course, Google Reader doesn’t work that way. Following its snafus when it first ventured into social sharing, the company made it awfully hard to share stuff. So whereas you can subscribe to anyone on FriendFeed (at least anyone that has an open feed, just like on Twitter), to see items on Google Reader, they have to share stuff with you. The problem with this is that most people don’t care to take the time to explicitly set their sharing settings to include all those people that may want to be included.

And there’s another problem with Google Reader’s social aspirations. The product from a sharing standpoint is extremely clunky. Sharing is tucked away in its own drop down menu, something which I routinely find is just about my last item to visit (and is normally relegated under the “Mark all as read” umbrella). The problem here is that all of my individual friends’ names are listed below the “Friends’ shared items” banner, so I keep it minimized to avoid clutter. I also keep it minimized because rarely do my friends ever comment on items. And if they do happen to, it’s even rarer that another person will comment as well, giving you — get this — a conversation. That’s something that FriendFeed does extremely well. Google Reader? Not so much.

It was smart of Google to tie the Google Reader profile into the newly emphasized Google Profiles — this is something we’re going to see more of across all its properties, no doubt. But what Google Reader really needs is some way to spur social usage. It needs either a main page where the most shared/most talked about items are listed, that gives you a rundown of who shared what. It sort of has a recommended area, with its “cool” feed, which shares popular items across the Google Reader ecosystem, but that’s far from social.

Or maybe it should add a list comments you leave on shared items to your main Google Profile. This would be a micro-blog of sorts with your take on stories. Of course, that would require that you allow anyone to see your shared items, which is something, again, you cannot do within Google Reader. But oddly, you can see others’ shared items if you know their public Shared Item page URL (which is a bunch of ugly numbers and letters and should be turned into their Google Profile name as well, if Google is going to go in that direction). It’s really quite a confusing mess.

As I noted, a ton of people use Google Reader as a primary way to go through items on the web. It seems natural that this would be a powerful social tool as well, but Google has effectively made it one of the most closed social networks around. It’s closed and its clunky. That just reeks of inactivity.

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