Wednesday, October 26, 2005

More Google Base Screenshots

Caleb Eggensperger sent in some more Google Base screenshots (thanks for that, as I still can’t see this live):

• Program policies (“Posting is not permitted for the promotion of body parts or human remains.”)
• Terms of service (“By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, modify, adapt, publish and otherwise use, with or without attribution such Content on Google services solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services.”)
• About (“[T]he Google Base interface is currently available only in English, English UK and German.”)
• Recipes, item view (There’s a “Payment” section to be seen here, as well as a small Google Maps inclusion. I’m not sure if a recipe is a standard or personalized item; Wouter Schut says the following item types can be selected; Course Schedules, Events and Activities, Housing, Jobs, News and Articles, People Profiles, Products, Reference Articles, Reviews, Services, Travel, Vehicles, and Wanted Ads.)
• Searching for recipes (Thumbnails are displayed along the Google Base search results; items can be sorted by different filters, like “Relevance"; there’s a “Report item” link below every item.)
• Login screen (A similar screen to what circulated around the web earlier already; below the login boxes we can see the “Are you a merchant or a webmaster, or do you have lots of stuff? Create multiple items with a bulk upload file” link.)
• Editing a recipe (Item values – here, quantity, calories, type, ingredient and so on – can be edited; labels can be attached; a free-text description can be written; also, an item expiration date can be set)
• Items overview (items have three different status flags: “draft”, “Processing - will be published soon”, and “Published.”)
• Uploading via Google Base and FTP (“[I]n order to successfully upload your file using FTP, you’ll need the FTP username and password that you set in Google Base.”)
• Editorial Guidelines (“No repeated and unnecessary punctuation or symbols . . . No excessive capitalization such as ’FREE’ . . . Check that you use correct spelling.”)

Do these screens finally illustrate what the program is going to be? I guess we need to wait for the final product to see how it interacts with Google, Froogle, Google Local et al to answer this. In the meantime, Google could only repeat to me what they announced to others as well; “We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which will complement existing methods such as web crawl and the Google Sitemaps program.”
A reader of Seweso’s blog by the name of Lone Deranger puts it somewhat more drastic:

“There is much more to this than an ’ebay/craigslist’ killer. This is the first part of Google putting all your information on line that you currently have lying around on your desktop. Before there was no way of doing this other than creating a website which most people are too lazy to do.

Oh, and guess what, once you have your documents uploaded on Googlebase, in a few months they’ll roll out Google Office and you’ll be able to edit them right there!”

Update: Google Base went live today.

More Google Base Screensh ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (25)

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