Google Base
Lots of talk on Google Base (un-announcement) these days. See some screenshots here. What’s the fuss about?
1) Online classifieds work.
Having lived in the Bay Area for some time, I became a huge fan of craigslist.org. It’s a simple classifieds site that allows you to post any ads, whether you want to sell a bike, rent out an apartment or look for an English teacher. I used it a number of times, and for example rented out my apartment in three hours after posting the ad. Craigslist is free (unless you are posting a job, for which there is a fee), your posts can be any length and you’ll get great response. Craigslist has started in some European cities as well, and EBay (even though it owns a share of Craigslist) runs a comeptitive service called Kijiji in markets where Craigslist isn’t strong. There has been a craigslist knock-off in Germany for some time called opusforum, but Kijiji bought them recently. Craigslist took many years to get to here it is, but I am sure eventually we will see similar services develop in Europe much more strongly than today.
2) Google and community?
Google has traditionally indexed content hosted at other sites and made it accessible through it’s service. That has changed with services like Maps, where Google actually runs the service, but even here it pulls reviews and addresses from third parties like yellow pages etc. While there are some services already that index classifieds from other sites (e.g. Oodle), it looks like Google actually wants to host the ads. This would mean they are starting to build a community, and you’ll need the “Google account” for more and more things (Gmail, Blogger, Base etc.). All this eventually helps Google to know their users better, present them with more targeted results but also more targeted advertising. After all, that’s what Yahoo is known for – there are many reasons to have an account at Yahoo, and it helps them to know their users.
Of course many people are talking about what this does to EBay. It’s a long story, but it’s fair to say that EBay has been looking hard at classifieds for a long time since it ideally complements EBay when sales are local and/or bulky items. And in countries with large enough agglomerations, as for example Germany, the online classifieds model should have a bright future.
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