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Microsoft's Answer to Google Base
douglips writes "Today Information Week is reporting on a forthcoming service from Microsoft intended to compete with Google Base. Instead of the freewheeling anything-goes nature of Google Base, the Microsoft project code named 'Fremont' will focus solely on classified ads. It will also allow restricting items to various audiences such as social networks or domain names. At this point, though, it appears to be a beta restricted to Microsofties." From the article: "In building Freemont, Wiseman and his five-person crew tried to make it both personal for people who only want to trade among family, friends and colleagues, while also providing the option of a public posting. Classifieds is a growing piece of the booming online advertising market that's expected to reach $13.8 billion by 2007, surpassing advertising spent on magazines, according to JupiterResearch. During that timeframe, spending on display ads and online classifieds together are expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 25 percent. "
From November 30... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/30/054425 6&tid=109&tid=95
Before this post, I'd never heard of Google Base. For anyone else in that boat, here's the URL:
:)
http://base.google.com/base/default
And yes, it shows up very high on the list of hits if you Google for "Google Base"
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
First Dupe!
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
If it's not a duplicate link to the same exact story, at least it's a dupe to the same essential coverage.
:)
Taco is getting better!
With all their wizardry, maybe they could use it to find posts like this one from 2 days ago!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
... I'm here only to see the bashing :)
> Instead of the freewheeling anything-goes nature of Google Base
So instead of something cool, open ended and something that will have uses its designers never imagined (like the Internet itself) they have made something boring, predictable and something that's been done about 100 times before.
Congratulations.
Oh yeah, and they are Wal-Marting a bunch of small local businesses like newspapers and craigslist. Nice.
Today Information Week is reporting on a forthcoming service from Slashdot intended to compete with Slashdot. Instead of the freewheeling anything-goes nature of Slashdot, the Slashdot project code named 'dupe' will focus solely on repeating previous stories. At this point, though, it appears to be a beta restricted to Slashdotters.
This sounds more like direct completion to craigslist rather than Google base.
But, I guess doing the whole clash of the titans thing, e.g. Microsoft vs. Google, does make the story sound a bit more sexy...
Google Base is not just classifieds plus some other free-wheeling stuff. Google Base is obviously an attempt by Google at creating/owning the Semantic Web, and a pretty damn good one at that.
You know what you duping?
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=microsoft+frem ont+google+base
There's another /. story on November 30 that seems strangely relevent to this one. You editors might want to check out this great new feature!
"Wiseman and his five-person crew tried to make it both personal for people who only want to trade among family, friends and colleagues"
Who the hell would want to do this? Just give it to one of them. I would want a service where I can post a classified to people who *aren't* family, friends, and colleagues.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The article says something about putting ads on MSN messenger / MSN spaces. Does this mean this is totally different from Ad Supported Free Windows. Also does anyone know if the ads will be as non-intrusive and follow the google ad sense model?
eh?
For the curious, Fremont is also the name of an area in Seattle. Here you go.
how is microsoft copying someone news
in other news we breathe air. surprisingly, we breathed air yesterday. analysts suspect we will breathe air tomorrow as well.
i think we need a different approach to msoft. think of him like that huge guy at the gym always grunting and dropping weights from the highest point possible making the loudest thud, or jack thompson. they want your attention, no, they thrive on it
calling them meathead or batt-shit-fucking-crazy lawyer just makes them work harder.
/.'ers are sterotypically computer people, and ergo sterotypically have the amazing power to ignore most people. so why not them?
i don't care
Since google came along, it seems Microsoft is becoming less relevant as people stop caring about "operating systems" and caring about actual services.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Maybe ScuttleMonkey and Zonk are having some kind of feud where each is determined to outdo the others posting on a certain story and Taco is too tied up with personal issues to sort them out.
That kind of rubbish happens in a lot of organisations.
I can imagine Taco being driven to distraction by thoughts of the impending BellSouth representatives knocking on his door looking for their protection money. Cash Only.
May the Maths Be with you!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Forthcoming? All you ever hear about MS is what they are *going to do* or when they are *going to release* a product. What you hear from Google is *today it was announced that ___ service has gone live*. I am sick of hearing what MS *plans* to do, just do it for chrissake.
29 comments and not a single "All your base..." joke. Gotta be a record.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The superiority lies in the names, Google and Microsoft. Joe Average is much more likely to gravitate towards a site that has a name he's heard of. To the uninitiated, Craigslist might sound like an eBaum's World sort of site.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
The resulting recursion results in singularity such the world has never seen, followed by world never being seen again...
... as more people get on the band wagon the harder it is for the pony to pull it.... and the market gets strained....
of course the difference here is going to be determined by how well such online classified reduce the use of ebay....
And there is nothing stopping google or anyone else from also providing such classified service.
Why would MS be announcing this now?
T0 get the competition going or are they just market testing?
If the market isn't there, and they drop it... it won't be the first time.... that is what market testing is for... and MS is really little more than a marketing company...
Who knows, maybe the traditional paper based classified publishers, who really know teh ins and outs of alot of the process, have never thought of doing it online...
MS wants a piece of which pie now?
Well, Craigslist is JUST for the classifieds side of things, much like MS' version of this. Google base, however, can be used for a plethora of different DB work, beyond just simple froogle item ads or such.
Off-Topic but I have no kharma right now.
I can no longer access Google (www.google.com) from work.
The company filters websites it finds objectional (including Yahoo and Google email, but not my DSL Extreme email. Go figure.) They just laid a block on the www.google.com domain, but NOT Google Maps, Google News, and as it turns out, Google Base.
I guess Google Cache got to be a problem. (Sigh.)
Google Base Beta? That's the followup to Foxbase Alpha, isn't it?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I can understand people knowing that my car is a 2004 Honda Civic. Maybe Google will try to sell me parts, and maybe they can provide me with an online car maintenance schedule automatically as part of their master plan to dominate all information. But what else do they ask for? What else do they want to know?
Is it basically a volunteering of household and personal financial information, much like MyPoints is (only you earn 'points' there. Not dissing, I worked there.)?
I'm genuinely interested in the benefit to the user, and not just 'because it's a Google service and it's there'.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I'm just wondering why anyone would want to do this.
Surely the more people who read your ads and can buy your stuff, the better?
D
Last week Google said they would not allow porn sites to use their Google Base, which just about everyone, including the major porn webmasters, agreed was fair enought. But those few lousy jerks and some bogus sites whined about it citing that "they would get any business". These are the people that we DON'T want to have any business because they load computers with spyware, adware, and spam.
Here's probably what really went down. Not willing to accept defeat, they tell their sob story to Micro$oft. Money, and perhaps some bodily fluids, were transacted. MS will probably deny there affiliation or that they --ahem--"oral contract" ever took place. Microsoft gets computers tapped, the bogus porn sites screw with our computers and tell their friends in the spam business. Everyone's general security is undermined.
When will these guys understand that no means no?
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Museum of media history
I don't think MS is trying to compete with Google at all. I suspect they just want Google (and the rest of the world) to think they are trying to compete.
Google, they think, will work harder, taking resources away from other new and inventive things that could hurt Microsoft.
Some real people will wait to do anything about Google Base while they ponder whether they should ignore Google and see what Microsoft is going to come up with "real soon now."
Its just the old time FUD factor use so successfully by IBM some 40 years ago. (FUD = fear, uncertainty and doubt)
Its my opinion and perhaps worth just what you paid for it.
Slashdot the Soap opera... come and see the softer side of /.
-everphilski-
They'll frecking bury it, they have done it before, they will do it again, ....
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Dare O, who is on a similar team within Microsoft, has blogged on some more details and, naturally, how much he likes 'Fremont' here... http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?g uid=85351eb5-509b-4c27-ad0e-1195fa802ca7
Who modded this guy up? As has been discussed 2^oo times before, the editors probably know full well what they're doing, but they do dupes for any combination of the following reasons:
a.) Bring in more advertising revenue, because a large portion of the slashdot crowd (myself included) read these dupes, having at least some idea that we're reading a dupe.
b.) People still click on the dupes, generating additional revenue for Slashdot from the advertisers that pay by-the-click.
c.) Some people have claimed before that they 'like the dupes', since they might have missed it the previous time around. (I guess they can't click on yesterdays news? Don't ask me to explain their logic...i dont understand it either.)
What amazes me the most about this whole dupe phenomenon is that there is not enough technology news that they already have their hands full. Another possiblility would be that they must have at least 1 (or preferably 2) articles related to google and/or microsoft everyday.
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
How the heck does this relates to the semantic web? in the semantic web you would have a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web).
Google base is going to be a catch-all bag of a myriad of different document formats (doc, pdfs, whatever) that will not have any "added meaning" beyond the meaning that they have right now. Which is of course none (eXclude XML of course).
On the other hand, this just reminded me of the time when MS included in their Hotmail terms of use that they would have intellectual property over whatever you send via hotmail.
I'm not saying that's their plan, but it reminds me that they are not exactly the kind of people I would trust to place my files.
Either that or you are Andy Kauffman playing another joke on us.
Actually this is not so similar to Google Base, but a more direct (and small-thinking) rip off of Craigslist, as far as I can see. There is the similarity that Microsoft also have a search engine to directly map over this data, but eWeek are going much too far (also in http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1877217,00.as p [eweek.com], linked) in ignoring the fundamental differences between a community listing site, an auction site (where the role of the provider is much more hands-on) and the need for Google to get their engine to work with sites dynamically generated from a back-end database...
Posting anonymously to avoid karma whoring
It's hard to ignore Microsoft when all your non-techie friends, family, co-workers etc. rely on Microsoft's products and take them for granted, just like that air-breathing business you mentioned. Microsoft's plans can be important because they can affect what you'll be dealing with in the world around you in the months and years to come. Ignoring them is like ignoring cockroaches - they're only going to multiply and grow bigger and stronger.
In the past, many slashdot users have complained that
this or that article has basically the same information
as a past article, differing only in the title.
They call that a "dupe".
This is not the case here.
Here the titles are also the same.
...Airborne furniture
-William Brendel
They HAVE to wait for others to announce things before they can INNOVATE on their ideas.
-- Boycott Shell
That's the name of the game. Announce today and get people to wait for MS to innovate on somebody else's product.
-- Boycott Shell
This isn't "overrated"
Well for starters .. you can't do nationwide searches with Craiglist. They do this on purpose and have shut down sites that have created these type of useful searches. I can't wait for MS version if they support what I want ..
Microsoft is more restrictive with betas while Goolge is more open Gmail and web acclerator are exceptions(or were). Thats one positive to google for those who like the cutting-edge
We want you to join th Linux user community
I started a website where users can talk about Google Base and discuss their issues and problems. I hope it helps!
http://www.googlebasetalk.com/