Like many others, I have been trying to figure out what Google Base is all about. Plainly most of the world sees it as a repository for classified ads, and thereby competition to both old-school businesses (newspapers etc.) and newer Web enterprises like Craigslist.
But it also seems to be intended as a way for people to pump large quantities of any information at all directly into the Google searchstream. Since Google is where so many of us go first when we’re looking for stuff, Google seems to be saying, give us your information directly so others can find it.
In some ways this is the ultimate “Web 2.0” play — just open up the gates to a world of users “information,” see what they put in, and make it accessible.
But I’ve now spent some time on the Google Base Help and FAQ pages and I still can’t really figure out the answers to some basic questions. Like: If I post a whole lot of material and then want to remove it in bulk, can I? Can I export stuff as easily as I import it? How does Google Base know who I am and that I am who I say I am? Is there an open interface that allows other services access to the information in Google Base the way they would have access to it if it were published on my own Web site? And so on. Maybe if I were using Google Base these questions would be easier to answer. But really, this product could have used some better framing, and perhaps some better thinking.
I’m all for experiments in moving the Web forward toward its programmable destiny, and it could be that Google Base’s structure and openness will emerge more clearly and favorably over time. Right now, I am uncomfortable with what Google Base seems to be all about — piling tons of information into containers owned and operated by a company that is less than fully transparent. I’d rather see a world in which a myriad of individual, independent content providers (i.e., Web users, i.e., people) publish stuff, and then mark it up with discoverable tags and XML annotations that allow Google and other third parties to organize and use that stuff in cool ways. In the latter scenario, I remain closer to what I’m publishing, I can reorganize it as necessary and control its fate more easily, and there’s a plainer connection between who I am and what is connected to my name.