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."

Email scrapers probably like this ...

[xmas2003]

[e-mail] can be obtained from USERNAME.googlepages.com and a list of the later can be pulled by using Google to search for site: googlepages.com [google.com]

Google Pages Initial Testing

[digitaldc]

It loads initially okay in IE7, but it is a bit slow right now. I am not sure why, but it crashed the first time I used it. It didn't want to save, and it didn't load some of the tools on the left-hand menu. The next time I tried, it worked okay, but it hung again when I was uploading some images.

It has several default templates to choose from, which is nice. There is a menu on the left side to easily adjust your fonts, colours and layout.

I reloaded it in Firefox 1.5.0.1, and got this error: '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.'

I then closed Firefox and reopened it, and it loaded perfectly.

I will give it a few days to work out the bugs, but for a free page creator with 100mb space, you can't beat it.

Re:DeJaVoogle

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to make up a random statistic I bet, ooh, 50% of all dead links on the internet are to Angelfire and Geocities sites (the other half seem to be to ~someoneshome/some.edu )

Some time ago I got to not even clicking to visit a site if I saw it was Angelfire or Geocities. Is it because all those people who built sites lost interest, moved onto other things? Certainly a percentage did use these free hosts as their first forray into the world of the web, but I bet you that's not the reason. I'm betting the largest number of those sites were taken down, either because they infringed on some trivial copyright, or because they broke the ever more ridiculous TOS of the hosts.

My point is this, publicly hosting user content is a NIGHTMARE. How are Google going to handle the slew of bad publicity that befalls them when they take down little Johnys "Bus route enthusiats website" because it contains "copyrighted" material? Are Google suddenly going to become porn police deciding where the line falls for those revealing prom pics that the teenage girls put up?

Google are heading into a minefield. I'm making no judgement one way or the other but expect to see a LOT of "Google are evil because.... / No they're not because...." stories very soon.

Advertising?

[balster neb]

What I'm not able to figure out is what kind of advertising is going to be there on user pages. Yahoo Geocities has a huge advertising pane on the right side of every page. I wonder how google will deal with inserting ads. If anyone here has got Google Pages access, what kind of advertising is present on the pages?

Another thing that's not clear: how much bandwidth they offer. Geocities has a daily bandwidth limit per user. If the limit is exceeded, the user's page isn't accesible for the rest of the day. It would be interesting to see how Google deals with this.

Re:I was one of the lucky few

[Inda]

You say that it's possible to edit the raw HTML but is it also possible to use <SCRIPT> and <STYLE> tags? How about adding links to external style sheets? Textboxes and dropdown menus etc?

Will Google serve my pages without line breaks as they do with their pages? I hope not as it's a nightmare to read and understand.

Does their editor create nice HTML or does it look like MS Word HTML?

Can I upload ZIP files, videos, MP3s etc?

I can't wait to have a play. Seems like it could be fun.

Re:Email scrapers probably like this ...

[Inda]

Is Scraping really that much of a problem these days?

My email address up there ^^ has been advertised on Slashdot since the start of the year. I've had exactly 16 emails sent to that address so far. The first one was from me testing it out, one has been from a fellow Slashdotter and the rest Spam. Where there's been an opt-out link, I've used it and there have been no repeat offenders.

I'm going to put my real email address back up after Spam #20. That's how much of a problem I think Scraping is.

Off-site storage?

[Life700MB]

Will they allow to use those 100Mb to store files to be linked and served from free hosted pages in other servers?


--
Superb hosting [tinyurl.com] 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95

Licenses

[h2g2bob]

It's nice to note how different the Google Pages and Yahoo Geocities Terms are,

Google's ToS:

"you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt and publish such Content on Google services solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. This license terminates when such Content is removed from the Google service to which you originally submitted."

Yahoo's ToS:

"the perpetual, irrevocable and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed"

See, google isn't (always) evil

Things that make you go hmmm...

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

Google gives away 2 GB with a Gmail account, but only 100 MB for web access. Why the difference?

Re:Advertising?

[dykofone]

I could imagine they would start to offer AdSense accounts to the Google Pages users. It gives the flexibility to insert the ads where you want, has the incentive of receiving money for clicks, and Google still makes cash.

Just a random guess though.

I want this!

[SpaghettiPattern]

Just a place I can put my little bit of GPL-ed code where it is accessible to anyone. Sometimes a project is just too small for sourceforge.

Hear, hear!

[MisterSquid]

Apple engineers, if you're reading this, please start working on your DOM model & Javascript.

In the past, my university's IT departments were models of Windows-centric ignorance regarding Mac OS X and Unix-workalikes. That's since changed and when I call about a network problem and tell them that I'm running OS X, they take my reports seriously rather than asking me to reboot my computer.

This last term (Winter quarter) my university introduced web-based grade submission. I pointed Safari at the website and was peremptorily notified that my browser (Safari 2.0.3) was not supported for not having a coherent DOM.

Apple does a lot of things right, especially as regards standards. But why does Apple choose to screw up so royally with something as important to developers as the DOM? This, really, is egg on Apple's face.

Re:DeJaVoogle

[aichpvee]

Kind of seems like Google dropped the ball on this one, though. Other than Google Pages being so limited that it's almost useless, it seems a bit broken even in the limited things it does. For instance I put an image on a page, and dragged it to one side. No matter what I did after that I couldn't drag it back to center, just to either side. There also didn't seem to be a clear or easy way to switch which page is your "Home Page".