When Google Base was announced, everyone immediately speculated about the future of eBay and Craigslist. The emergence of a noteworthy challenger to eBay or Craiglist was inevitable and I think the more meaningful question is what a jolt to the security of eBay and Craigslist is going to produce for the online world. We could be seeing the start of the post-bubble era's equivalent of the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. There's more to an ad than just the ability to have an ad and lots of ads, though admittedly critical mass is key. We may see accelerated innovation from eBay or Craiglist to keep their core value propositions from becoming commodotized.
If Google Base is what it appears to be from our limited knowledge of it, it stands to be potential paradigm shift in the viability of regionally based online communities because it could allow small marketplaces to become viable. I'm saying this under the assumption that they would eventually publish an API that would allow third-parties to leverage their classifieds service to produce value added services like a regionally based online classifieds service that's designed to serve a region, a city or even a neighborhood. Another possibility is that someone else will be the first to tap into a third-party network to widen their classifieds distribution channels.
Commerce is an integral part of any community online or off and the growth of a community is often planned side by side with the growth of its economy. In online communities, classified ads have long been suggested as a way of driving up the user base, but there are a couple of problems with this assumption. The first is that few organizations have the resources to sustain a viable online marketplace in the presence of long established heavyweights like eBay or Craigslist. The second is that using commerce to drive an online community often comes at the cost of having a real community. It tends to be an all or nothing affair. There aren't many online equivalents of real life small downtowns where a cozy blend of commerce and people create a core to develop a community around.
As the developer of Social Wave, I've received many requests and a lot of advice to put more attention into developing online ads, but with the limited resources and time that I have, there's just no way Social Wave would be able to sustain an online marketplace unless I made the marketplace the defining element of the way the site and its user interface was designed. Improved classifieds ads is one of our most common requests and to address this demand, I've been looking for a reliable classifieds brokerage service that would allow Social Wave to both publish and receive regionally based classifieds content without having to become a classifieds site itself. So far anything that resembles such a service has so far left me unimpressed.
Could Google Base or an innovation from eBay or Craigslist be the classifieds information backbone that a community focused site like Social Wave needs to produce the online equivalent of the small business downtown strip that helps make real communities possible?
For screenshots and more Speculation on Googlebase, check out the following blogs:
Google Blogoscope and New Google Blog.
