Where is Google Going?
Rob emailed me all excited about Google Pages, Google’s new easy-to-use web page publishing tool. It’s sort of a geocities 2.0 — a place for free hosting of simple sites consisting of a few pages, but with easier to use and more powerful web page creation tools. Nothing earth shattering.
What got me excited when I saw Google Pages was Google Base. Google Base is one of the most underrated and misunderstood recent undertakings by Google. Essentially, it’s a giant, open database. There are a bunch of predefined datatypes (e.g., housing listing, recipe, etc.) you can choose from or, if those don’t fit, you can create your own data types. Then you can enter items of a particular data type, which are then indexed and available in Google’s system. Google Pages would become incredibly powerful with a few simple tools to easily pull in entries from Google Base.
Imagine you are a small business person, let’s say a real estate broker. You want some basic information about yourself on your web site. The brochure & business card stuff: like who you are, how to contact you, what areas and types of properties you specialize in, etc. Create all of that in Google Pages. It’s easy. Now stick all of your property listings into Google Base. It’ll make them easily searchable in Google and Google Base proper. Now imagine if there were tools to pull out filtered lists from Google Base on to your Google Pages. Do this for your listings, and you have a functoinal, free, easy to update and maintain, well indexed, well formed web site. This would replicate a huge portion of the functionality of most basic content management systems on the web, except you pay nothing for hosting, you have no maintenance/upgrade/etc concerns (e.g., did I patch WordPress for that new vulnerability yet?), your content is specially indexed by the premiere search engine
and it’s all easy. Wow. So far so good.
But it gets more interesting. Google is piloting email hosting for domains. Instead of an @gmail.com addresses you get an @yourcompany.com addresses. Now imagine they start offering this same service for Google Pages, and they add these mythical Google Base integration features; you’ve just solved the web needs of most small and medium sized businesses right there. Holy crap.
But that’s not all. Google is also throwing support into the OpenOffice project. In my opinion, they’re doing this not simply to encourage not the project itself, but to support the Open Document standard implemented by recent versions of OpenOffice. Google knows the power of universal data formats (see: HTML). I suspect, as rumored, they are working on a web based word processor and/or spreadsheet application (good examples of these already exist, so this is plausible). But I don’t think they will offer just web-based editors, but web-based editing, storage and sharing of these documents. If Google can do all of that, well, what do we need Microsoft for again?
And, while this is all exciting and interesting, I’m not suggesting it’s all good. But that’s another post.
Update: One thing I didn’t mention but have been thinking about is Google and e-commerce (i.e., selling crap to people over the web). This is something that makes sense both in a Google Base and Pages context and lo and behold, they’ve announced that they will begin to allow payment for items listed on Google Base with a credit card associated with a Google account. Google Pages + Google Base + Google Base online payments = Amazon and Yahoo stores…
Update: More Google rumours: they’re flirting with creating a social bookmarking system like del.icious, which doesn’t really play in to this. However, this observation that you can upload and host your own HTML on Google Pages plays in to the above speculation — you’re not constrained to soley using Google’s tools to design and update your hosted content.
February 27th, 2006 at 11:48 am
Here’s what I pretend not to get: why does GOOG give people 100MB for their web space and ten times that for their email?
February 27th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Two reasons I can think of.
1) Email is often largely redundant. If I send the same email to 10 people with gmail accounts, google only has to store one copy of that email, so there is a LOT of opportunity for storage efficiency.
2) Bandwidth demands for popular web resources can vastly outstrip the costs of storage. Your email store is only accessible to you; your web space is accessible to anyone. Therefore, popular publicly available resources (i.e., web pages) can get a lot of traffic, driving up bandwidth expenses. By limiting your web space to 100 MB, if your Google Page becomes popular, demand for the resources you have hosted are not likely to drive up bandwidth demand (e.g., you post some large images of your brand new Macbook Pro disassembly and it gets posted to slashdot and digg). Google would rather have you stick large things, like video, into Google Video which is designed to handle that kind of demand…
February 27th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Other things to think about: reputation management for selling crap (a la ebay and amazon); Google doesn’t handle this yet. And spam. Google has been struggling with spam blogs on blogger and Google Base is going to likely have similar problems… so there’s that. This is why Craigslist is so successful; they spend a lot of time and care on trying to limit scammers and spammers. Google isn’t so good at that touchy-feely labor intensive crap; they like to write algorithms to handle that stuff… so it’ll be interesting to see how they manage that.
February 27th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
So more on this cuz I just thought of it. I’ve been playing with the latest beta release of Drupal lately (an open source content management / web app framework). Two new modules are the Content Creation Kit (CCK) and the Views module. Relating this to my Pages + Base idea, the CCK is Google Base and the missing piece of glue I describe is the Views module. If Google made a tool that works like the Drupal Views module for filtering and displaying Google Base content easily into Google Pages, holy crap. That’s all I have to say about that.
February 28th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
What’s your thought on “Where is Yahoo going?” I like Flickr, too.