All the speculation and rumors about Google base is hitting the web right now, and I’m as intrigued about this as most.

But lots of people are looking at this and ‘finding’ evidence of a master plan … that Google is going to marry this with Froogle and start competing with Craigslist and eBay etc. etc.

Well, that may be, down the road, but I think strategically that’s a fundamental misreading of the company.

Sure, Google has plans. But I think they’re much more about doing cool stuff and seeing what sticks than generating some incredible master plan for world domination and following it to its conclusion.

I think that letting lots of smart cool people do lots of smart cool stuff (the famous one day a week at Google you work on some personal project) results in lots of smart cool projects.

And I think that we see these start to launch when their stock (literally) gets high enough within Google.