Google Base: It goes beyond classifieds. The popular view today seems to be that Google Base is all about classifieds, but as mentioned earlier, it’s much more than that. (Incidentally, still smarting I missed the “All Your Bases” happy fun humorous moment opportunity.)
If Google Base lets you tag entries, you could easily create a podcast feed by just uploading MP3s and giving each the same tag. Likewise, you could create a blog by uploading text entries with the same tag, and a vodcast with videos. Google could easily offer a wiki interface to let you manage all your content, and a feed to go with it.
From a programming perspective, what’s nice about all this is the prospect of a common API for all sorts of content.
So while Craigslist ought to be watching closely, so should many others. This is Google’s answer to Flickr and just about everyone else who’s hosting microcontent.
It may also be worth noting that Google Base and Google Purchases aren’t the ONLY new features coming soon. There is also a Google Videoblog service, among other search engine enhancements, as mentioned here: http://bigellow.blogspot.com
Potentially, it won’t stop there! I’m thinking of Friends Reunited, all those horrid ‘price comparison’ sites and the biggest ‘What’s On, Where’ source…
Could shake up a lot of people!
GBase is still 502′d.
From what I’ve been able to glean, it’s a formalization of the “bag of stuff” / hashtable storage pattern. Scary useful for particular kinds of applications – I predict a client-side web app framework written in javascript, deployed via Greasemonkey, using this for a storage engine in the near future.