What’s perhaps most interesting about the Google Base design is that it appears to have been designed from the ground up with RSS and XML at its center. One need look no further then the detailed XML Schema and extensive RSS 2.0 specification to realize that Google intends to build the world’s largest RSS “reader” which in turn will become the world’s largest XML database.
Burnham’s Beat: RSS and Google Base: Google Feeds Off The Web
Google extends RSS through the use of a namespace, adding attributes to the <item> level. While this will certainly consume feeds, it seems that the feed’s author will need to be fairly clear about what the feed is providing. I wonder how long it will be before we see extensions built for commerce apps that will generate these beefed up feeds? In many ways it should be fairly straight forward if you are operating some sort of online inventory or catalog to generate these googlified RSS feeds.
Of course there is still the problem of getting the feeds to Google. It is not clear if Google will ‘aggregate’ feeds or merely parse the feed and create records. For it to be really cool, it needs to regularly read the feed. The focus on the bulk upload pages seems to be on FTP, but RSS is certainly lurking in the background. If I can give Google Base a URL for a catalog feed and have it chekc the URL for new items, then this makes a lot of sense. I guess we shall see.
technorati tags: google, google base, rss, xml, feeds