Slashdot Mirror
Google Base Launches
An anonymous reader writes "As announced on the Google Blog, Google Base has finally launched. According to Google, Google Base enables content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We'll host the items and make them searchable for free."
Good for 'public' sites But bad for private intranet sites
I'm not certain that it's "good" for anything. Pretty much all the previous Google apps were something you could "get" just by checking into it quickly. However, most regular people don't truly understand the concept of a formal database. As a result, we usually need other metaphors to help them understand the databases their using. (e.g. A filing system, a card index, etc.)
What Google Base is proposing is very interesting (though of dubious use at the moment), but I just don't think that users are going to be rushing to grab ahold. Users will continue to keep their recipes on their computers or Recipe Database websites, jobs will continue to be posted on Monster, and life will otherwise continue on as is.
Nice try Google, but I think this one has a long way to go until it's out of Beta.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Larry: I've been trying to infer structure from web pages all day, and boy are my arms tired!
... everything. Just by the example details you can tell it's poised to kill craigslist's classifieds.
Sergey: Hey Larry, what if we could trick our users into supplying structure along with their data?
Larry: Why, we would rule the world!
[Larry and Sergey burst into song...]
~
But seriously, this is way cool. Here's where Google Base could go from here:
1. Allow more complex data types (the AJAX interface is beautiful and simple, but really limiting... maybe allow more complex types to be built through an API?) I'm thinking of structures and some kind of instantiation system.
2. Publish a really rich library of types. What they've got right now is a good start, but more common types will prevent people from creating redundant and not-quite-identical types. For instance, if there had been a "Slashdot geek" category, we wouldn't all have had to create our own when we entered ourselves into the 'Base after reading this headline.
3. Allow data to be restricted to groups of users. Google already has concepts of users and groups, so this is a no-brainer... a few customized viewing pages, and it could replace Flickr, Blogs,
(about the subject title... my cat wrote it just now when he jumped onto my laptop, and it seemed as good as anything I was about to come up with)
Apparantly you can link directly to a Google Base hosted image. This means basically free image hosting with virtually unlimited bandwidth. I wonder how long it will be until Google clamps down on this, if at all.
Here's an example.
Frankly, I'm more interested in when the API's come out for this thing. The kind of apps people will build that take advantage of this will be quite interesting. Hmm... Things might get pretty interesting pretty fast once the API's are out.