Yesterday Google announced a rather interesting, and I believe strategic move, allowing users of Google Docs to put forms in front of their online spreadsheets through Google Docs. I didn’t realize this until now, but Google really has a dynamic, unflattened data source that they have been providing through their Google Spreadsheets. Now, with the ability to add forms, in many ways we are seeing another hosted development platform for website owners to use for whatever they would like to collect data for. This has been long needed – I can’t tell you how many people have asked me at some time to install Formmail.pl for them to send them e-mails of a simple form they have installed on their website. Now, they can just set up a Google doc, and a form to front that doc, and no e-mail is necessary!
The functionality is very simple right now, but one has to remember this is Google, which at one point was just a simple search engine. Google always starts simple, and takes over the world with that simple plan. Imagine if Google were to incorporate their new graphing API into these forms for simple survey-taking capabilities. Now, add to that the ability for more robust reporting beyond that, ability to include single cells from a spreadsheet, and perhaps a query language of sorts to interface with it. Google could very soon be competing with perhaps at first the likes of Amazon S3 storage services, but even more, their SimpleDB query engine, at a much more robust level. This is Google after all. I wouldn’t put it past them.
