When everyone was all agog a couple of weeks ago over the ephemeral appearance of Google Base, I have to admit, I just didn’t get it. People kept getting their panties in a bunch over a Google-run, user-defined database, that it would somehow compete with Craigslist or eBay. At the time, I didn’t really grok how one followed the other - the screenshots I saw definitely showed a database creation app, but I didn’t see how this necessarily led people to jump to these classifieds-smashing assumptions.

But Google Automat connects those dots. It’s not just the database, or the payment system, but the thing that ties them together that makes it Google a Craigslist (more than eBay, I think) competitor.

PaidContent says:

Automat creates a contextual ad identical in appearance to Google AdWords, which now run down the right side of every Google search-results page. Automat can create a free-standing Web page to serve as the product description page.

You use Base to list items, and Payments to…what? Pay Google? Pay sellers? Both? Either way, it’s brilliant, in a Google kind of way - harnessing the entropy of the internet and making it work. In this case, they put classified ads in the context of search ads, and allow people to sell directly to each other (presumably). This does Craigslist one better by allowing you to search across all listings or locally (presumably while in Local search mode). They won’t harm eBay (much), unless they plan on offering auctions, which seems unlikely at this stage.

Maybe this was blatantly obvious to everyone weeks ago, but until today I didn’t see the line between the dots so crisply. Now this makes sense, and seems very Googlesque, which makes me actually believe it.