Battelle says that the release of Google Calendar shows that Google has become a portal.

But the is-a-portal/not-a-portal debate isn't terribly relevant anymore. Yes, Google used to just redirect the user to other people's content, now Google is hosting more of that content - but does that make Google a "portal," and does it matter?

This shift started with Gmail, and was confirmed 4/1/05 with the "infinity plus one" announcement. Once you accept Google hosting all your email and providing a killer app to do it, the next steps follow logically -- Video, Base, Writely, Calendar ... Google Flickr? Hosted Desktop? Google Grid?

The word "portal" is so imprecise and loaded with negative connotations -- walled gardens, lock-in, banner ads, conflict of interest -- that the word has lost some of its descriptive power.

So I don't know if Google is a portal or not, and it doesn't really matter to me. I do know that Google is now directly hosting and managing a lot more of my information and not just referring me out to thrid-party search results.

And that is a major shift that will require competencies that Google is only starting to explore such as personalization, social recommendation and fine-grained access control.