Posts tagged as: googlebase

Google Destruction?

Posted on Monday, December 5, 2005 at 11:06 AM (permalink)

Google launches beta of database that may capture a sizeable portion of the classified ads market, and three weeks later Verizon announces the sale of its yellow pages division. Coincidence?

Tags: advertising google googlebase

I just grokked microcontent

Posted on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 at 12:54 PM (permalink)

Sometimes you realize that two or three different terms actually refer to the same idea, and suddenly the world seems a little clearer. That just happened for me with "microcontent." I had filed that away as one of those buzzwords I woud have to decipher eventually. I was much more interested in the idea of individual chunks of data, such as blog posts, floating freely through the datasphere. I was reading a post on Joshua Porter's Bokardo, which led me to a great essay by Terry Heaton. I saw that Terry's idea of "unbundled media," and Googlebase entries, and RSS items are all examples of microcontent. Now I feel better. A lot of walls have collapsed into a large common area.

Tags: googlebase microcontent rss

Googlebase Criticisms

Posted on Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 8:05 PM (permalink)

Sam Ruby is doing a thorough review of the Googlebase data formats and he isn't happy about their feeds:

None of the complex types are valid RDF/XML, and therefore can't be used in RSS 1.0 --also personals and news are incomplete. None of the guids in the RSS 2.0 feeds are valid permalinks. ... People who propose extensions should try to validate them first.

Tags: google googlebase rdf rss sam_ruby validation xml

2006: The Year the Web Explodes

Posted on Friday, November 18, 2005 at 7:13 AM (permalink)

Once I get past the annoyance at Google for dribbling out Googlebase in such a piecemeal fashion, I can see a much larger consequence than the simple issue of features within Googlebase itself. They have accelerated existing forces that will blow the web apart within the next 6 to 8 months. It is no coincidence that just as I'm thinking about Google's RSS reading database I'm also working to make my blogs able to deliver their content as customized RSS feeds on demand.

The explosion I am talking about is the shifting of a website's content from internal to external. Instead of a website being a "place" where data "is" and other sites "point" to, a website will be a source of data that is in many external databases, including Google. Why "go" to a website when all of its content has already been absorbed and remixed into the collective datastream.

So why the hyperbole? Haven't sites been publishing RSS feeds for years? Yes, but those feeds only included recent items. Google wants ALL of our data. If websites now start leaving all their content outside their internal database for anyone to collect, the data will propagate and then morph into a different web from what we have now.

Tags: feed google googlebase rss

Everyone has their own Googlebase

Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 8:30 AM (permalink)

The initial reaction in the blogosphere is very different from mine. Most people are reacting to the mere fact that Google has a "database," and filtering it through their personal view of Google, Ebay, Microsoft, etc. Few are actually looking at how it works, and the ones who do often say that they are intimidated. Dude! have you ever SEEN a database?

One problem, which Bosworth may have realized more than I, is that today's end-users may actually be less application savvy than even the average user in 1985. Many of them, especially bloggers, even A-list bloggers, use the computer purely as a communication and publishing device. They are extremely adept at IM, blogging, email, IRC, and even the new areas like tags, but they probably have no reason to use Excel, and I wonder how many users under the age of 25 have ever seen Access or any other database of similar complexity.

I'm not proclaiming the dumbing down of the average computer user, just the shifting of their experience to text oriented, social interactions. So are they ready for the type of database I want? Will they ever be? Surely if we have to start with tags and work our way back up to even flat files, which are still way beyond the capability of Googlebase, this is going to be a long education process. But there are still going to be application developers. Will they be solely professionals? Will we not see a new wave of user-developers emerge on the web as we saw during the PC revolution?

I still think Googlebase has to become much more, and that they realize it. For example, to drive the Google maps API, which is red-hot right now, you need a list of locations. Surely they understand that that list should be stored in Googlebase. So they must be planning to deliver the ability to store and manage lists. Which means they must deliver the capability of a flat file database at a minimum.

Tags: api blogosphere database google googlebase googlemap

On the other hand

Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 8:05 AM (permalink)

What if Googlebase isn't a database attached to the Google service, an online version of Access? What if it is just a database designed to post and manage Google search entries? Maybe I misread their intentions. I think I misread their ambitions. A Google entry form is just a glorified submit page. Even if it does take bulk submits, more on that later, it still is just a submit mechanism. On the other hand if it actually is a submit mechanism for search, the SEOs are going to be going out of their minds right now. I better spend some time wth their blogs. And of course, John Battelle's.

Tags: database google googlebase seo

This is not Googlebase

Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 7:37 AM (permalink)

This is not Googlebase. This is not a beta. This is not an alpha. This is not an app. This is a screen show. This will be the most actively tested and documented screen show in software history.

I can't blame them for wanting to put something up, but this will not help them. If they leave this up for a long time, people will dismiss it. If they keep dribbling out features like this, people will get angry. I'm already getting angry thinking about wasting time describing what is up now.

My best podcast was with Adam Bosworth describing why Reflex failed and Access didn't. He is too wise to get himself in this type of situation. Yet he apparently has.

Tags: bosworth database google googlebase

Googlebase, Googlebase, Googlebase!

Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 at 7:19 AM (permalink)

It's up. This has to be the first time the launch of a database has gotten people excited since Microsoft Access, another Bosworth effort. I can't wait until Adam is allowed to talk about this. That will be enough to get me podcasting again. (via Alex Barnet)

Tags: access bosworth database google googlebase

What the hell is going on with GoogleBase?

Posted on Monday, October 31, 2005 at 8:31 PM (permalink)

I can't tell if Google is playing some kind of elaborate hoax or just getting sloppy. After launching a flood of speculation by turning base.google.com on for a brief period last week, this page has been displaying a broken sign-in form for the last few days. Right now if you open the page it loads your Google membership cookie to get your account name and asks for the matching password. Entering a valid password causes a "loading" message to flashing tantalizingly for a few seconds and then the sign-in form reappears. The form isn't simply broken, since an invalid password returns an error showing that the membership database was queried correctly. So what gives? Since last week's tease there have been over 1,700 articles about Googlebase, according to Google News. Is this some kind of game? I think it is a sign that Google is out of control. A theme I will return to in the future.

Tags: googlebase

Does the word "Base" give you a hint?

Posted on Wednesday, October 26, 2005 at 11:44 AM (permalink)

Am I the only one who sees GoogleBase as an online database? You know, like Access only on the web. The blogosphere and the MSM are rushing to describe it as competition for Ebay and Craigslist in offering a free site for classified ads, and that probably is part of Google's plan. But I've known Adam Bosworth for more than 20 years, and he is a database guy through and through. It can't be a coincidence that he started working for Google almost a year before GoogleBase made its first appearance. The only blogger I've seen who has recognized the possibility of GoogleBase becoming a standard end-user database has been Om Malik, and he assumes that since Quickbase wasn't a success GoogleBase will also fail to attract an audience. He failed to mention that Quickbase sucks. The performance is unacceptable and the functionality is weak. I can't believe Bosworth would make those mistakes. The acceptance of online apps is also much greater now than when Qucikbase appeared. We'll have to wait until it appears, but I think a fast end-user database with large amounts of storage and a good API could become a significant part of the web services infrastructure.

Tags: api bosworth database googlebase

Adam Bosworth + Google = GoogleBase

Posted on Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 4:59 PM (permalink)

There is much buzz about a soon to be released online database at base.google.com. I guess that was easy to predict when Google hired Adam Bosworth. Adam is the author of Reflex, the prettiest database in history, and Access, the database that ate the Xbase world. You can listen to Adam's views on database design in a podcast I did with him this past spring.

Tags: bosworth googlebase

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