After hearing about Google’s BigTable data-organizing scheme the other day, posters at Google Blogoscoped started musing about the possibility of a Google database where anyone could list and organize oceans of content. Then Tony Ruscoe discovered that Google had recently added the subdomain base.google.com. Then the site went live. Briefly. Long enough for folks to capture some screenshots and an official description:
Post your items on Google.
Google Base is Google
4 comments
No no no! Didn’t they get my email?? It was supposed to be GRID.google.com, not janky base.google.com!
But seriously — I am curious to find out exactly what they mean by ‘host your content.’ And of course how open & accessible the back-end is to outside apps — for instance, how hard or easy will it be for someone to write a ‘backup to GoogleBase’ plugin for Movable Type?
A: very, very easy.
I would guess the folks at Blogoscoped have the idea:
I don’t mean that specific example, but that kind of extensibility. We already know databases rule the world. Turn everyone into a little database creator and oh! The Power! The Power!
Aha! But so far what GBase lacks is any indication of cross-referencing between items… so far this thing is an Excel spreadsheet, not a truly rad relational database. I want items to link to other items!
But perhaps Google is looking to establish a system of ‘messy relationships’ by meshing their search technology w/ all the attributes and tags and stuff applied to these items? That might be interesting. So connections wouldn’t have to be explicitly made; they would just be discovered & established. Hmm…
The snarkmatrix awaits you