Fresh in from the Adwords blog, the article Inside AdWords: All you ever wanted to know about Google Base but were afraid to ask included this tidbit:
Since its launch, Google Base has proven useful for both personal and business use. People have uploaded their favorite recipes, podcast links, events, personal profiles, clinical trial information, and even protein databases. And, as expected, a subset of Google Base items have been listed for sale. To improve the user experience for these item types, we’re planning to start letting people buy Google Base commercial items using their Google Accounts.
This strikes me as another, “it’s easy and cheap to do, so we might as well try” efforts by Google. Over the next few weeks we’ll see how much thought Google has put in to the challenges of web shopping. Craig Newmark asked some good questions of startup Edgeio and I think they apply here as well. In fact, Craigslist was in the news today–it’s being sued for bias in real estate ads. Clearly, the line between open bulletin board and publishing company is not yet well defined in the online world.
