Now there is a prototype of Coop available to download as a Firefox add-on. The add-on is not what the final version will look like by far and is meant only as a way for interested parties to see what coop might look like when all is said and done. Currently the service only allows you to log into a Facebook account, but does allow you to share links, photos, and videos with your Facebook friends by simply dropping items onto their faces.

We gave the Facebook only version a try. The interface is very easy to use and it worked pretty well for sending things directly to Facebook friends. The problem of course is that not everyone has a Facebook account.

It's going to be interesting to see how this one develops, especially when Coop is able to handle users beyond the realm of Facebook.

[Via TechCrunch]

Google made a number of big(ish) announcements at yesterday's Google Press Day, but isn't that what Press Day is for? The biggest, or at least most fun, announcement was Google Trends, a new project at Google Labs that gives you pretty Alexa-like charts of search activity and Google News articles for the keywords you punch in. The charts are reminiscent of Google Finance, with news articles marked to correspond to points on the chart. By separating them with commas you can specify up to five different keywords to show on the same chart.

Last week I insinuated that Google Health might be among the news, but that was a little off. What Google did launch is Google Co-op, which is two things: First of all, it's a sort of tagging system that allows Google to create "vertical" search engines on specialized topics, e.g. Health. This works by allowing experts and professionals to "label" (i.e. tag) a bunch of URLs and upload them en masse. The tagging end of the equation isn't aimed at end users a la Yahoo! My Web 2.0 (yet), but the results are. Second, Google Co-op does something called "Subscribed Links," which basically allows third parties to create modules that will pop up for relevant searches, much in the way that, say, links to Google Maps currently pop up when you search for something that looks like a location. Currently there aren't very many Subscribed Links available, but they do show what's possible. The Digg subscription, for example, shows you recent popular posts related to your query on Digg along with how many diggs they've gotten. The Fandango subscription shows you movie information and links to tickets and showtimes for movie title queries. I can imagine this becoming really useful.

Google also announced the Beta release of Google Desktop 4. The biggest new feature is the inclusion of Google Gadgets, i.e. widgets. I won't go into too much detail here since widgets are all but ubiquitous these days (see Apple's Dashboard and the Yahoo! Widget Engine). Instead, take a loot at the Gadget library to see what's available. Of course, there's an open API for creating your own, and you can even import some Gadgets from your Personalized Home to Google Desktop 4, and Google will recommend Gadgets for you based on frequent searches.

Lastly, Google is being a little quiet about the last of its announcements, Google Notebook. It's described as "a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you're searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others," but that's about all we know. They could take this in a number of idrections, but it sounds to me a bit like the ScrapBook extension for Firefox, though I'm sure it will have a significant web-based component. Look for Google Notebook to launch next week at Google Labs.