November 16, 2005
@ 11:45 PM
Comments [3]
GoogleBase is del.icio.us 2.0

I finally got to try out Google Base and it does seem to be an interesting experience. It reminds me a lot of del.icio.us. Of course, it's missing key functionality like web feeds and a proper API, but if I was told to build the next version of del.icio.us it would probably look a bit like Google Base. The three key improvements to del.icio.us being

  1. Supporting more item types beyond "favorite link". This means supporting metadata fields beyond title, link and description.
  2. Allowing users to define their own fields
  3. Adding  much better search capabilities
This definitely looks like an experiment by Google to see what people do with the service which might explain it's unpolished look. It's not clear how people will end up using it but I'm sure they will since its the latest new thing from Google.

 

Categories: Web Development

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Thursday, 17 November 2005 02:28:17 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Dare, you should read this post by Bill Burnham... http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2005/11/rss_and_google_.html#comment-11277708
Robert Young
Thursday, 17 November 2005 03:39:43 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Mmm... To me it looks more like an move by Google to provide classified ads than to help users tag content the way del.icio.us does.

Or am I missing the point you're making?
Marius Coomans
Thursday, 17 November 2005 04:15:10 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Marius,
It looks like you did miss the point. del.icio.us allows me to post items of interest to myself that others might be interested in. These items are my favorite links and to enable others find them I label the links using tags. The interesting question is why are links the only things that could be shared this way? Flickr has already shown that this model works for photos as well.

Google has simply extended the metaphor to include several other item types as well. A number of them are based on classified ads but given the open nature of the service and lack of UI polish, this isn't going to be an eBay killer. More than likely it's usage will eveolve organically like Flickr and del.icio.us have.
Dare Obasanjo
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