The Massively Self-Organising Catalogue Otherwise known as "Google Base". It's been up for a while, and it's pretty much what I thought it would be - a way for anyone to upload their items to Google and guarantee they get indexed. So now online merchants don't need to own host their own catalogue anymore. Soon they'll open it up so people can develop their own services off the listings. Interestingly, Google realised that very quickly they would end up with lists of millions of out-of-date items. So they wrote this:

Most types of items (such as products, services, housing, autos, wanted ads, jobs, travel, events, and news) automatically expire after 30 days.

There really isnt much excuse left for a small business not to have an ecommerce capability anymore...  ¶ 2:06 PM