Google Introduces Page Creator

Seoulstriker writes "Google has introduced an AJAX web-publishing application called Google Page Creator. The app is great for getting whatever photos, information, files you want published, and it doesn't have to be in the typical blog format. The published site is hosted at the gmail user page. There are several templates and page formats to work from, and as far as I can tell, everything is WYSIWYG. The published HTML is very clean, but it does have some leftover fragments from editing pages repeatedly. If you want to be precise, you can manually edit the HTML. There is a Google Groups page available for the service. It took about 30 seconds to get a rudimentary page online." PC World has a quick rundown on the service at their site.

file hosting limit

Apparently the file storage limit is 100mb. Not sure if there's a limit to the data transferred.

Re:file hosting limit

Not sure if there's a limit to the data transferred.

Well, it sure does look that way ;-)

Google Page Creator is having a little trouble right now. This is not because of anything you did; it's just a little hiccup in our system that will hopefully go away soon. We apologize for the inconvenience, and recommend you try reloading this page.

Either that or the Slashdot Effect has been renamed The Hiccups.

How good is it

Does this replace the soon to be discontinued Frontpage for the unsophisticated user? Is MS retreating from the field just as Google takes it?

Re:How good is it

the days of everyone wanting his or her own webpage just to rant out a bunch of poorly stucture meme-junk are over as well. That's what blogs are for.

No, they're not. I've no interest in creating a blog [1], I just want to publish a few pages and some photos.

1: with the associated baggage of commenting, regular updates and whatever.

Re:How good is it

. . .the days of everyone wanting his or her own webpage just to rant out a bunch of poorly stucture meme-junk are over as well. That's what blogs are for.

And thank God you don't need a webpage for that. I, for one, welcome our direct to the mind meme-junk beaming overlords.

KFG

Re:How good is it

The markup seems to be striving to be as bad as Front Page. Somebody should tell them that <font> elements are very GeoCities 1997, that <p> elements can't be nested, and that creating a bunch of <div class="foo"> elements isn't that much better than nested tables. I thought Google could afford to hire competent people?

Drew McLellan [allinthehead.com] has knocked together a page in which all of the above flaws can be seen. [googlepages.com]

Re:How good is it - it does NOT VALIDATE ;-)

Since when has Google ever cared about W3C validation? Google.com has 51 errors, [w3.org] an amazingly high number considering how small the page is visually.

That's because...

Google made their front page (and some of their other pages) as small as possible, byte-wise. Their home page has so many errors on it because they intentionally leave out the quotes on attributes and other stuff like that, to reduce the size of the page.

I don't know how many people visit that page every day... let's say 10 million. If they shave 1000 bytes off the size of the file by not including spaces, quotes, slashes, etc. wherever possible, they save ten gigs per day in bandwidth.

Ten gigs per day over a month is about 300 gigs of bandwidth saved per month. Plus, they do it on some other pages, not just the home page, so they're saving a lot of bandwidth overall.

On the other hand, I can't stand non-standard-compliant HTML. It just makes me cringe.

Re:How good is it

You know, I don't think the intented users of Google Page Creator are going to give an ass's ass whether the code it generates is compliant with the W3C HTML 4.01 Strict specification. They just want access to basic hosting and formatting.

Take the Drew McLellan page you linked to as an example. The HTML may be atrocious, but I haven't looked at the source code, so I wouldn't know. All I see is a sparse, but not entirely inelegant, basic web page. What's so bad about that?

Oops!

Google Page Creator is having a little trouble right now. This is not because of anything you did; it's just a little hiccup in our system that will hopefully go away soon. We apologize for the inconvenience, and recommend you try reloading this page.

A sterling job on the XSS defenses though

Had a play earlier as I was worried you might be susceptible to a similar thing as the MySpace "Samy is my hero" style XSS attack.

The following was witnessed:

• Inserting script tags = tags removed before publishing.
• Inserting style tags = tags removed before publishing.
• Inserting element on events (onclick, onblur, etc) = attributes stripped before publishing.
• Inserting basic element style attributes = tags left in, style applied.
• Inserting advanced element style attributes (stuff that can rewrite DOM) = just those attributes stripped, formatting attributes left intact.

So for all of the basics, the Google Page thingy passes all basic tests on XSS attacks.

Well done :)

I'm even recommended it on my forum [bowlie.com] already because the security gives me enough peace of mind to not regret doing so.

For a free service its not bad

for a free service that gives you 100mb of storage its not bad. I signed up and tested it. Your pages do not have any adds and you get 100mb for free. Even if you do not want to create a website its not bad for hosting picture files and other things.

Browser Support

Shame that it can't be used in Opera. I'll be loading up Firefox now to have a go of it though.

Re:Browser Support

Just go to www.ie7.com [ie7.com] to upgrade browsers.

Already plenty of tools out there

This might be a valuable invention for very non-technical users, but there are already plenty of solutions out there for creating web content easily. Most weblogging systems already allow the user to create permanent pages outside of a weblogging structure, see Douglass, Little, & Smith's Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress [amazon.com] . If you can use Wordpress [wordpress.org] to make a huge e-commerce site, Grandma can certainly use it to put up a static but re-editable set of photos (once grandson has installed the backend). Google is definitely repeating past accomplishments here.

The Shotgun Effect

From the article on PC World:

Anyone remember when Google did a very few things, like the search engine itself and Gmail, but did them spectacularly well? It's now doing many, many things with erratic results. Let's hope that its next step isn't to do an infinite number of things badly--a road that any number of growing technology companies have taken, sadly.

I believe what we are witnessing here is something of a bit of a "shotgun effect" where a company tries to offer many different things and invariably along the way gets something right.

Microsoft and Google have this in common. They both did one or two things extremely well which resulted in insane success. Soon after this, they both started producing products in all conceivable fields.

Now, I agree with the author in the case of Microsoft as they started making products that anyone would buy just because the name "Microsoft" was on them (Visual J++ [wikipedia.org] anyone?). I just created my homepage [googlepages.com] and was frustrated with how little I could do. Oh well, what did I spend on this? Nothing, a few seconds of my time, that's all.

I'm completely happy with Google trying to re-invent everything because when they do, it's more or less free for me. There's no harm because I didn't pay a ton of money for the product like I would have in Microsoft's case.

No Safari support yet

Slightly annoying, no safari support yet, only internet explorer and firefox (couldn't check opera).

No opera either

Nothing new, google does firefox and IE first then months later opera and safari get their turn.

Gmail all of sudden stopped complaining that I was using opera and just worked. So they do work on it. Just have to wait for it.

great for targeted spamming

[e-mail] is equal to username.googlepages.com. By running a search on google.com for the item you want to send SPAM around for, limited to the subdomains of googlepages.com, you can easily find a target audience to send spam to, since you can derive their e-mail address from the hostnames you get hits on your search from.

Why Google is still cool

A chuckle from the FAQ:

11. I don't want my landlady to find out about my pet ferret. How can I unpublish my pages?

Odd

That's odd - I just signed in, and it said "This page is locked by another user". Now where did I put my tinfoil hat...

Why not just change their name to "Google Beta"?

They are really good at introducing new services, not so hot at finishing them.

-Eric (who has been using "Google Groups Beta" for several years now

Overall idea is to make more money

Yup make more money from Free Web Hosting. According to netcraft [netcraft.com] "The free hosting ramp-ups by Microsoft and Go Daddy are a response to surging revenue from contextual ads on web sites. In its most recent quarter, Google reported $1.1 billion in advertising revenue from its own sites, and another $799 million from third-party sites using its AdSense program. The rapid growth of domain parking services has also illustrated the earning potential of large portfolios of web pages bearing contextual ads."

I am dam sure; they are going to introduce paid web hosting (Ghosting).

Misunderstanding of google strategy

I think people forget that google does not nessesarily create these apps with a plan in mind. Many of them are the result of the personal time that google gives it's employees for personal projects. When one looks interesting they (google) elevate it within the company and wait to see where it goes.

Gotta love editable service agreement windows.

1. Highlight the entire agreement that you have to agree to abide by.
2. Delete it.
3. Enter the text "I agree that Google will pay me $1 Million Dollars (*cue Dr. Evil*) if Page Creator is ever unavailable for me to use."
4. Profit!

Email Address

Unfortunately your gmail address is also the name used in the URL for your page. At least MSN Spaces set it up so your email address wasn't part of the site URL.

BeVeryEvil.googlepages.com

I just threw this up real fast...

http://beveryevil.googlepages.com/ [googlepages.com] ...just linked some images relating to google's censorship in China. I like the idea of having google host it with "googlepages.com" in the url. :)