After seeing a post on WebProNews saying Google's rumored "Base" product might be live Wednesday (today) I decided to check it out. And it is indeed live, as you can see if you click here. In a word, it's fascinating. It is indeed a direct competitor to classifieds services, be they in newspapers or online. Type in a search for, say, marketing and you can find not only "help wanted" type listing but also people offering their marketing services. And you can run that search within Google Base, the specific category you're in at the time or the entire web.

To submit an item for listing you select an existing category or create a new one then enter the deets (I've got to stop sounding like the rest of the Weblogs, Inc people) on your item, be it a car, a recipe, a reference article or some other piece of property or information. For those items up for sale you can include a Google Map to your location along with other contact information. To describe your item there are spaces for a long-form description as well as a box to enter "labels" which seems to fulfill the same idea as tags. Give it a matter of a couple of weeks and this will be so packed with listings it won't even be funny.