Semantic Void

I’ve been toying around with Google Spreadsheets for quite sometime. It has a lot of useful features (sharing etc) that go way beyond the desktop office but it lacks on a very crucial feature, a query interface - a wrapper to query saved sheets. Google has done an excellent job in porting a part of the office to the web. But the web is all about networks and connections between applications. Wouldn’t it be great if I could use Google Spreadsheets as my online database. I can’t help but imagine the mashups I could create if this feature was available.

• Blogger + Google Spreadsheets = Dynamism as in Wordpress
• Google Maps + Google Spreadsheets = a whole multitude of data retaining maps
• Gmail + Google Spreadsheets = a powerful tagging system for Gmail
• Google Search + Google Spreadsheets = a search engine for my textual data (probably having a query syntax like: ‘anand insheet:sheet1 incolumn:name‘
• Google Analytics + Google Spreadsheets = custom analytic views based on what I want to track

As far as storage is concerned, which could be a bottleneck as databases continue to grow, GSpreadsheets could be linked up with Gmail to utilize the free space from the virtually unlimited mail box size.

Dabble DB is trying to do something similar but they don’t have an SQL-like query interface yet. Hopefully Google would be willing to venture out in this idea first.