Bronte Media

Dear Google Base Product Manager,

How about that stock price, huh?

But the reason I am writing today is that I thought you could have done a lot better job with the launch of Google Base. A lot better. As it stands, Google Base looks, to quote a profilific blogger who quoted another blogger, “like a 1985 dBASE file with less functionality. It’s ugly.”

My personal thoughts are that it is too much for one product. Like an engineer thought it would be cool to consolidate it into one thing that people are having are hard time figuring out. I like your intentions but I think you could have done it more elegantly by 2.0′ing two of your products.

One is Blogger. Alot of what Google Base is, structuredblogging.org aims to do as well. Get your users posting spicy tamales recipes in Google Base format on their own blogs (those guys are ego maniacs, they’ll love it!). Then the frustrated ones on Typepad will too and all other bloggers.

The second product you should 2.0 is your core search product. It’s a little too chubby to crawl classifieds and other highly dynamic sites in real time. That’s fine. But why not make Froogle better and more generic? Accept merchant feeds with ease and then take on the task of accepting classifieds feeds.

Publishers want to give you their content but they don’t want users going to base.google.com and searching them. They’d prefer if your main index rated them number one for ’software jobs san francisco’ in the organic index and pointed the interested programmer to their pages for more information.

You can keep base.google.com if you want. But in the background as a net to catch all those who want to give you information but aren’t publishers or outspoken bloggers. And about that name, Google Base; you know that Al Quaeda means ‘the base’ don’t you? Just checking.

Hoping to catch up for lunch at the ‘plex soon.

Yours Truly,

Niki Scevak