There has been a lot of hyperventilating over Google Base. It's an Ebay killer . It spells the end of the $4 billion newspaper classified ad business. It's the new Flickr , or will Flickerize everything. It's the next step in building the Google Grid.

The truth is, Google Base is all this and more. It's freeform enough that it's really a Rorschach ink blot with the potential to be just about anything. It's the Big Table that will store and search any semi-structured information, distributed globally, and massively scaled on the Google File System.

So much speculation is out there that I won't add "baseless" chatter (at least not in this post -- I reserve the right to chatter baselessly in the future). But I will make the observation that the Google Base user interface itself indicates that more is coming.

There is one lonely tab at the top of the Google Base window, called "My Items." Why have a tab all by itself unless more tabs are contemplated?

Gmail has tabs, too, but certainly more than just one:

Same with Google Reader:

Adwords also uses tabs, but never just one lonely tab all by itself:

Adsense also has multiple tabs, but not just one:

So if Google Base has just one tab called "My Items," what other tabs could be in the pipeline? How about "My Friends' Items," or "My Saved Items," or "My Community's Items," or "My News Stories" or "My Shopping List"? This sounds a lot like Yahoo's My Web 2.0, but for products, photos, videos, TV shows, music, news, word processing and spreadsheet documents, books, locations, calendars and all things digital -- not just web pages.

Now if all this content was shared, tagged, and ranked, then we would have EPIC - The 'Evolving Personalized Information Construct:

Everyone participates to create a living, breathing mediascape.... Google combines all of its services ... into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid, or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone to create as well as consume media.

The only thing missing is the "social recommendation engine," which according to EPIC, will be supplied by acquiring Amazon. Are you ready for Googlezon?