Google Pages Launches

An anonymous reader writes "Google released the first public beta of its Google Pages service Wednesday, allowing users who signed up for the service in January and February to begin creating personal websites using an easy-to-use, browser-based tool. The service gives each user 100 MB of free storage space on Google's servers. To use the Google Page Creator tool, users must have an existing Google account. However, only those who signed up early (in January and February) to use Google Pages have access to the current beta. No new signups are being accepted at this time, Google said. The company is expected to open Page Creator to more widespread use over the next few weeks."

DeJaVoogle

[ExE122]

Funny, I could've sworn GeoCities [geocities.com] and Angelfire [angelfire.com] had something like this many many years ago. Complete with page building tools and wizards...

The only true advantage I see to this is that Google gives you a LOT more disk space for free, wheras you have to pay for more with G&A... but perhaps that's why we're seeing "Sorry, we are unable to offer new accounts today. We appreciate your interest and invite you to add your Gmail address to our wait list. We'll let you know when we've enabled your account."

I'm not trying to advertise for G&A, I just don't see how this is something to jump up and down about. Search engine, Email, webpages, online stores/auctions... they're just becoming the next Yahoo.

--
"Man Bites Dog
Then Bites Self"

Google Launches

[Mattygfunk1]

It'll be interesting to watch how cautiously they approach this launch. After the Google Analytics launch debarcle [com.com] I'll watch intensely at how much they've learned.

Re:DeJaVoogle

[holdenholden]

That, the the priviledge to have your content indexed, searched, and linked to your other Google accounts (gmail, adwords, analytics). No thanks. I think I will skip on this one.

Re:DeJaVoogle

[tehshen]

... they're just becoming the next Yahoo.

Is that so bad a thing? I kind of liked Yahoo.

GeoCities was a nice service, but was let down by the ads pane (pain?) taking over half the screen. Yahoo! mail was nice but suffered from too low storage. Lots of people here are turned off by "portal"-style pages with loads of links on them - Google put their search page first and moved all the links someplace else.

I've noticed that Google seem to wait for a technology to develop, see where it trips up, then make its own GVersion. Kind of nifty, really.

Do you get the feelling...

[simong]

That someone at Google is browsing Yahoo! just a little too much?

nice,but...

[penguin-collective]

Does anybody actually still just edit static web pages? And does anybody still edit navigational structures by hand instead of using a CMS for maintaining the navigational elements?

It seems to me that a home page site should, at a minimum, support static pages, blogs, a gallery, calendar, comments, and a file archive under a common navigational structure.

So, this seems like a neat tour-de-force in AJAX, but I think it's missing where the world has been moving over the last few years.

I tried it - seems well implemented

[MarkWatson]

I run two of my own servers but I signed up because I was looking for a simple web hosting service to recommend to a few non-technical friends. The editing features are simple enough to use. I ended up putting a boring little rant on Spirituality and Responsibility [googlepages.com] on my free googlepages account - nothing that I would put on my professional web sites, and material that is probably too boring even for my blog :-)

Re:Email scrapers probably like this ...

[ricepudd]

From my experience, many ISP's embed your username somewhere in the URL to their free webspace offerings. Is this any different?

According to this page [googlepages.com], spammers hadn't caught on to this the last time the page was updated.

Re:Email scrapers probably like this ...

[jbarr]

But then again, Gmail's spam handling is excellent, so I personally wouldn't worry about it.

I receive about 300-400 spam emails per month, and typically Gmail flags them correctly. I almost never get false positives, and only occasionally, it misses a few, but overall, spam really hasn't been an issue for me with Gmail.

So Will PAgeCreator increase spam? Probably, but it really shouldn't impact Gmail users that much.

-Jim
http://gmailtips.com/ [gmailtips.com]
http://googlepagestips.com/ [googlepagestips.com]
http://pagecreatortips.com/ [pagecreatortips.com]

Re:Dupe

[strider44]

Unfortunately it's not a dupe when it's reporting new news. Just as Microsoft releasing the beta for Windows Vista isn't a dupe of Microsoft announcing that there will be a Windows Vista, this is not a dupe of that article. Didn't the "google released this Wednesday" clue you in that the article might actually be reporting something different than the article from more than a month ago, even if they are on the same software?

Re:nice,but...

[Spad]

Clearly you haven't visited many personal websites lately. Most of them are exactly the same as they have been for years - namely some poorly coloured text on a tiled image background with a few pictures of their pets and a huge animated .gif for the title.

Suprisingly few people actually have the knowledge or inclination to go as far as putting up photo galleries, blogs, calendars and other associated crap on their own personal homepage - there are plenty of other services (read: MySpace for the mostpart) that do that for you.

I didn't like it

[khendron]

I tried it yesterday, and didn't like it.

Oh, it's a groovy implementation of AJAX, but I found it was very awkward to use. It was restrictive enough to be frustrating, yet flexible enough to be confusing. I think Google was shooting for that perfect balance between usability and features, and missed.

you're supporting my point

[penguin-collective]

You are supporting my point: the "home page" has been replaced by other services, which incidentally also generate an externally visible page. The people who still attempt to create a classical home page generate something that's ugly and obsolete.

Re:Email scrapers probably like this ...

[Jugalator]

Maybe they just don't bother about SpamGourmet addresses? ;-)

Re:DeJaVoogle

[se7en11]

I've noticed that Google seem to wait for a technology to develop, see where it trips up, then make its own GVersion. Kind of nifty, really.

This is what Apple is doing and doing quite sucessfully. They just add an "i" to things though.

Re:DeJaVoogle

[bjpirt]

agreed, I'm getting increasingly nervous about just how much of your data google could index if you let them. I'd be curious about how many people using google desktop are aware of the privacy implacations. Most end users just see it as a cool way of finding stuff on your computer, completely unaware that data is being sent to google.

I know, I know - do no evil

(for now)

Re:Pages does not support Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because the Safari team have spent too much time on CSS 2 (just so they can release smug acid test press releases) rather then getting the browser to work in real world situations.

Apple engineers, if you're reading this, please start working on your DOM model & Javascript. As things stand your rather crappy browser is hard to support.

Re:Things that make you go hmmm...

[cinnamoninja]

The difference is that storage is cheap, but bandwidth is expensive.

If you store 1 GB of mail, you will probably only access each individual message 5 times, ever. If you put up 1 GB of data on the web, you want it to be downloaded by as many people as possible, every day for the live of the page.

Cinnamon

Re:nice,but...

[Skapare]

I still edit static web pages, if what you mean is the construction of the page layout and design. I even code HTML directly in most cases because I had to learn HTML since various HTML creator programs are still too limited to be able to do everything.

If you mean hand building the navigational layout, how the hell is some CMS program gonna know what I want? So you probably mean whether I actually put the navigational elements in the pages or just specify them somewhere else and let the pages be built for me. So far I haven't seen a CMS system that doesn't suck, so I either do build them by hand (if you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself), or in a few cases, I write programs to do it (and usually in C though some now in in Pike).

Show me a CMS system that's easy to use (can be used w/o a GUI, too), generates pages that do NOT have query strings (e.g. the junk after a "?"), uses decent names for URLs (not a bunch of coded numbers), and does not require a database.

But all that is for my own web sites I host on my own web servers. For public home page websites, like GeoCities, MySpace, or GooglePages, some kind of web based creation tool is essential, given the otherwise vast diversity of environments the tools would have to work in. There, of course, a database is needed. But that would be a highly custom CMS. I'm not running a public home page site, and am damned glad I'm not. I wouldn't want to be so limited.

Still, some nice free JavaScript that implements web interfaces might be interesting. Maybe I should go look for some (never have even looked before).

Makes sense..

[Rob Kaper]

If people depend on Google for their searches, e-mail, instant messaging, maps, satellite views, advertising and news (beta).. they might as well use it for their web presence.

Anyone who has ever worked for the KGB must be so jealous at the rate of voluntary user data centralisation.

Re:you're supporting my point

[Fourier]

The people who still attempt to create a classical home page generate something that's ugly and obsolete.

Ugly, perhaps, but hardly obsolete. No-frills static HTML is accessible to everyone, whether they're reading on a high-powered standards-compliant browser, a mobile phone, a textmode browser, or a screen reader.