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Google Pages Launches 205

Posted by samzenpus from the the-google-wide-web dept.
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."
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Google Pages Launches More

Google Pages Launches

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  • DeJaVoogle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ExE122 ( 954104 ) * on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:07AM (#14979675) Homepage Journal
    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"

    • Re:DeJaVoogle (Score:3, Insightful)

      by holdenholden ( 961300 )
      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 (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bjpirt ( 251795 )
        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)
        • What exactly do you imagine is going to happen? Google, by their own terms of service, can't sell your personal data to anyone else. And if they start doing stupid things with it, I'll stop using their services and that'll be that.
          • Google, by their own terms of service, can't sell your personal data to anyone else. And if they start doing stupid things with it, I'll stop using their services and that'll be that.

            Well, maybe, but they'll still have all your stuff that you put on their machines. And they'll do what they like with it. They're a "public" corporation now, answerable to their shareholders rather than to their customers.

            Of course, if you put it on your own privately-owned web site, google's bots will eventually find it, and
        • What's this data that's being sent to Google? If you read the manual and turn off Advanced Features and Cross-System Searching, Google Desktop sends exactly nothing to Google. Zero, zip, zilch.

    • Re:DeJaVoogle (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tehshen ( 794722 ) <tehshen@gmail.com> on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:14AM (#14979701)
      ... 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.
      • The pain (originally) with geocities what trying to tell someone your address. It was usually something like www.geocities.com/citypark/coolgang/theeliteguys/ 3 847. Then I found tripod, which not only had a whopping 11 MB of space, but also let you have an address like myname.tripod.com or www.tripod.com/~myname. Oh, and all this gets subverted by $3.95/Month shared hosting which gives you a gig of space, no ads and more bandwidth than you can shake a stick at. As well as mysql, phpbb, gallery2, and a bu

      • Re:DeJaVoogle (Score:2, Insightful)

        by se7en11 ( 833841 )
        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.

      • 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.

        Sounds like "embrace and extend"...

    • Re:DeJaVoogle (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:25AM (#14979743)
      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.
      • Just look at the domain and don't click, as always.

        Anyone who is serious about their website does *not* use geocities (and definately not angelfire - I've not seen anything on there recently but warez and hacking sites). If you want to know what some 14 year old thinks then look at them, otherwise steer clear.

        It's a pity google will probably get added to that list - it can only hurt their advertisers once that reflex is ingrained.

      • Re:DeJaVoogle (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Are Google suddenly going to become porn police deciding where the line falls for those revealing prom pics that the teenage girls put up?

        Links please. kthxbye

    • Advertising? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by balster neb ( 645686 )
      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

      • Re:Advertising? (Score:2, Informative)

        by mancontr ( 775899 )
        I use it, and don't see any ad.
        About the bandwidth limit, I dunno, haven't reached it..
      • Google doesn't seem to be placing any ads yet: http://scruffles.googlepages.com/ [googlepages.com]
      • 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.

        I never understood why Geocities (and others) would take down popular pages so often. Isn't the whole concept based around serving ads to as many people as possible?


      • hat 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.

        I haven't an account, so I'd welcome more informative responses, but I'll speculate:

        • There will be no ads during beta. The first hit is free.
        • The ads that do appear will be based on the content of the page, and will be mostly text--ala the ads that you see on everyone's blog. It only m

      • Re:Advertising? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dykofone ( 787059 )
        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 dunno. I applied to AdSense at least a month ago and still haven't heard anything, and they turned down a different one saying the page wasn't accessable (when it most certainly was).
      • Might be like Blogger, where they don't put on any ads, but offer you an easy way to sign up for adsense. People would like Google Pages if they could make money from the ads too.

    • Re:DeJaVoogle (Score:4, Informative)

      by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:34AM (#14979787) Homepage
      The really nice thing about Page Creator is that it provides simple Web pages without the annoyance of ads and "ad gadgets" that so many others include. Page Creator Web pages, so far, are clean, and easy to make. If Google eventually does include ads, you can bet that it'll be unobtrusive like most of its other services.

      Google doesn't always come out with "new" products, but it often implements them in new and fresh ways.

      -Jim
      http://gmailtips.com/ [gmailtips.com]
      http://googlepagestips.com/ [googlepagestips.com]
      http://pagecreatortips.com/ [pagecreatortips.com]
    • There's something to be said for not necessarily doing something *new*, but doing it *better* than it had been previously, and building a number of disparate products into a cohesive, well-designed whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. See "Apple."
    • Funny, I could've sworn GeoCities [geocities.com] and Angelfire [angelfire.com] had something like this many many years ago.

      Without any ads whatsoever?
      • Sure. About 10 years ago, Geocities only asked that you put a link to geocities.com in your page somewhere. There were no ads at all on pages, unless you count everyone's AllAdvantage.com pyramid scheme banners that they voluntarily added to their pages. Just because Google doesn't have ads on Googlecities now doesn't mean that they'll never have ads.
    • That's the one thing that really intrigues me about Google's Page Creator: The concept that it is capable of quickly creating simple, ad-hoc, "temporary pages. While you are absolutely correct about the non-availability of many GeoCities and AngelFire pages, if we know that about GooglePages from the start, then GooglePages won't seem like it's fallen into the same realm. GooglePages is a great place to post temporary or short-term pages for things like events, notes, and other stuff that don't require long
      • I don't really see your point about temporary pages. Sure, there is an easy and quick to use wysiwyg editor, but theres also the same kind of thing on many other webhosts. Not only that, but social networking sites are gaining in popularity these days and if anyone has something they want to say to their friends (or whoever else), chances are it will go onto their myspace\livejournal pages and will be read within a day or two. Email and IM also make it trivially easy to get info to people.


        Personally, the
      • If a temporary page area is what you're looking for, one of the many personal Wiki services out there is probably a better bet. My project, Wikinote [wikinote.com], requires only a username and password to sign up (no email address or other info), provides a decent amount of Wiki markup (though very little control over page appearence), and keeps page history if you ever need to revert. In addition, SSL is used throughout the page, passwords are salted and hashed (and never stored), and there is integration with Shortify [shortify.com]
    • There are actually quite a few free web hosts, many of which with far better offerings than Geocities or Angelfire. I haven't made a webpage in the last few years, but it looks like the site [freewebspace.net] I used to use to find hosts still works. I never really got why Geocities and Angelfire are so popular when they just offer a small amount of space, ads, and static pages (last time I checked). I mean, if you look you can find free hosts that offer 5 GB of space, others that offer no ads, and still others that offer
    • Finished making this with Google Pages just last night. It's actually really fun to work with... my only gripe is that there's no Safari support for us Mac users (but we can use Firefox.)
    • Are you saying this story is deja news [dejanews.com]?

  • Google Launches (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mattygfunk1 ( 596840 ) * on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:07AM (#14979679)
    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.

  • Pages does not support Safari (Score:5, Informative)

    by mytec ( 686565 ) * on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:13AM (#14979695) Journal
    Sorry, your web browser is not yet supported. Our programming wizards tried their darndest to get Google Page Creator to work with as many browsers as possible. But alas, even the most expert practitioners of web sorcery must sleep now and again, lest their JavaScript magic run dry. So, for now, you'll need either to download a new version of Firefox or download a new version of Internet Explorer (Windows only), and then come right back.

    • Re:Pages does not support Safari (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 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.

      • Hear, hear! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MisterSquid ( 231834 )

        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 we

  • I was one of the lucky few (Score:5, Informative)

    by PIPBoy3000 ( 619296 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:14AM (#14979698)
    I managed to sign up very early, so I got to play with it a fair bit. Since I'm a web developer, I was most interested in the technology rather than having yet another web site I maintain. Here's the things they did well, in my opinion:
    • The use of AJAX is well done. Pages save by themselves, you can drag and align images, and there's a nifty file upload utility.
    • There's simple versioning, allowing work on pages before publishing.
    • The HTML editor is super-easy. They do let you play with the raw HTML, which might cause problems down the road.
    In general, I think it'll be a nice tool for people wanting a small little web site with a handful of pages. It doesn't do other things very well, such as maintaining navigation between pages or doing any sort of interactive pages. Still, Google tries hard to capture the 80% useage and I think they've done so with this little application.

    • Re:I was one of the lucky few (Score:5, Informative)

      by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:33AM (#14979785) Homepage Journal
      On the down side, they claim XHTML 1.0 Strict, but the pages they produce aren't even well-formed. (Notably, they don't close br, hr, and img tags.)

      They also use divs where they should be using spans (if they must use these generic tags). And they leave out some required attributes.

      Overall, it's a pretty sloppy job.

      -Peter

    • Re:I was one of the lucky few (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Inda ( 580031 ) <slash.20.inda@spamgourmet.com> on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:34AM (#14979789) Journal
      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.
      • It removes page breaks, create better HTML than MS Word but far from perfect, and you can upload any filetype.

      • Re:I was one of the lucky few (Score:4, Informative)

        by TOWebstress ( 855727 ) * on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:57AM (#14979915)
        I've also got a beta account on Google pages, and am a web designer. The HTML it creates is passable, but not good. It can't touch the horror that MS Word creates (but what could?), but it still uses tags, which I find a bit odd. You can manipulate the raw code, but it's not set up in a way that would encourage the average user to do so. Overall, I found it a comparable product to the other basic WYSIWYG web building tools that have been online for years...a cleaner interface (a la Google, they do that well), but really nothing new. It's easy to use though. One needn't know so much as how a site is structured in order to build a site, and linking between pages is pretty intuitive. There doesn't seem to be any way to see an overall structure of the site you're creating though. You can end up just building and adding pages from here, there any everwhere, but never having the benefit of seeing a site or file structure to keep architecture in check. That said, I suspect that most of the people who use this product will be building little site...a few pages...and don't have big demands for advanced features.
      • no script and style tags AFAIK, its quite well protected to avoid XSS, try to do any onEvent and it will be striped.

        It's a pretty neat work on that side, the XHTML issue may be another story, but I think is quite good by now, it can be better really soon.
      • Well, at least when I tried to add scripts it pulled them out before display. That doesn't mean you can't work-around their parsing though.
    • Am I the only one who sick of this Cartman-Google "you can't come" marketing strategy?
      • You're the only one who thinks it's a marketing strategy. Everyone else understands that google pages are hosted on servers, and servers need bandwidth and storage space, and therefore googlepages is open to as many people as they can handle at any one time.

        If google did it your way, if they just opened it to everyone, then they'd be slashdotted within minutes, and then you'd be back here posting a comment along the lines of "google sucks b/c they are slashdotted. wtf. they should no bettar!!!111"

        basically

  • Email scrapers probably like this ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:16AM (#14979707) Homepage
    USERNAME@gmail.com 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]
    • 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 ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:28AM (#14979760) Homepage
      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]
      • 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.
      • Actually, I disagree. As someone who can draw 300 spams a day (managing multiple domains), I'd say Gmail is subpar. In my experience Yahoo is better, and the Bayesian filtering on my desktop [sourceforge.net] is a lot better. Also, when I was using Gmail it had false spam identifications for me often enough (1 or 2 per week) to be really annoying.

        Maybe it is something about the composition of emails that I get, but Gmail is not a system I'd recommend as a spam trap. To be fair, it does seem to handle most of them correct
      • Err, I'm sorry - but Google's spam handling is crappy.

        Quite often, I have spam that shows up in my inbox - and more than a few times, I've had legitimate e-mail get marked as spam, despite repeatedly marking it as not-spam.

        Google's spam handling is like Yahoo!'s - it occasionally works, but it's nothing to write home about. Subpar or mediocre would sum it up.
    • Yes, one would be very wise to create a new Google account strictly for this service, rather than use their primary Gmail account. I hope Google will eventually take out the middle step and allow people to specify a different URL for their Google pages without having to use multiple accounts.
    • You are so right on that one! Why couldn't they have done something more difficult to link back to my email address. For instance my school email address can't possibly be guessed from my school website (~).

      It's almost as if Google thinks that this is some kind of well-known common practice!

  • Erm, I already had access... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ricepudd ( 960850 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:17AM (#14979712)
    I'm a little confused. I signed up to GooglePages in February when Slashdot first reported this story [slashdot.org], and I've been happily been able to log in and edit my site ever since... I take it from this article that this hasn't been the case for everyone?

  • Do you get the feelling... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by simong ( 32944 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:20AM (#14979722) Homepage
    That someone at Google is browsing Yahoo! just a little too much?

  • Initial impressions (Score:5, Informative)

    by simon_hibbs2 ( 792812 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:21AM (#14979726)
    GooglePages offers a very basic set of editing tools and a bunch of pre-defined page templates. It's pretty similar in usability to the GeoCities tools I used a while back, but the big difference is that it's all in-browser editing. With GeoCities I had to download an editor app and fire it up if I wanted to work on my pages, whereas with GooglePages you can immediately start entering content which makes it much more user friendly. I almost gave up of GeoCities several times due to the initial configuration process.

    I wish Google had better integration, or even just basic links between it's services. Logged into Gmail and want to edit your GooglePages? Tough, you might as well open a seperate browser tab and navigate there from scratch. Likewise if you have a personalised Google home page - you can load a widget into it linking to your gmail, but again if you're in Gmail there's no easy way to go to your Google homepage reliably.

    I know these are 'beta' services and they're beign incrementaly improved - the chat client in Gmail is nice - but Gmail has been in beta for a year or so now and how difficult would it be to just put simple links in place?

    Simon
    • Might the lack of a links on every google page to every google service possible be on purpose?

      Several posts above moan about how portals like yahoo filled their pages with ever more stuff making them impossible to use.

      Perhaps google has decided to keep all their services seperate making it possible to keep their pages clean and not wasting screen space on links that should be in your bookmarks anyway.

      You seem to want to turn google in another Yahoo. No thank you.

    • I've also been playing with Google Pages. It's slick in the way that we expect Google products to be slick. But hey, it's just an AJAX page editor. The fact that it saves your work on the fly is nice, and I find the design intuitive despite what some people have posted here, but this doesn't cover any new ground functionally - it doesn't *change how you work* - like Gmail did with its conversations feature and built-in Google search for email (which has essentially made the clerical task of sorting email re
    • Maybe it has something to do with the fact that not everybody has a page at GooglePages?

      And maybe, just maybe - it has something to do with these itsy bitsy thing called usability (you know, cluttering a page because some Joe Random user wanted a link to his puppy) and minimizing server load?

      You know, just a thought, that's all.
  • 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: 'G

  • nice,but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by penguin-collective ( 932038 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:25AM (#14979745)
    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.

    • Re:nice,but... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Spad ( 470073 )
      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) t
      • 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:nice,but... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @10:16AM (#14980363) Homepage

      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).

  • I tried it - seems well implemented (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MarkWatson ( 189759 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:27AM (#14979751) Homepage
    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 :-)

  • I didn't like it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by khendron ( 225184 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:38AM (#14979802) Homepage
    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.

  • That's strange... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Zaatxe ( 939368 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:54AM (#14979892)
    However, only those who signed up early (in January and February) to use Google Pages have access to the current beta.

    I signed up to it less than a week ago and 15 minutes ago I got an e-mail saying I could already use it. And it's true, I can.

  • Off-site storage? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Life700MB ( 930032 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @08:58AM (#14979918)

    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

    • Re:Off-site storage? (Score:3, Informative)

      by ender- ( 42944 )
      Will they allow to use those 100Mb to store files to be linked and served from free hosted pages in other servers?

      Well thus far I have been able to upload pictures and link to them from offsite without any problems. Not sure if they will continue to allow that or not. I'm also not sure what kind of bandwidth restrictions they might place on it. I suppose I could post a largish pic to the next Fark photoshop contest and see how it does.

  • Google Pages, Google Word (or whatever they're calling it), Gmail, etc. etc. ... isn't this the online future that Netscape promised with Navigator 4? Presuming your browser handles the various tech, the OS you use really does become more or less irrelevant as all work is done entirely in the context of html.

    We're seeing it with the bigger apps too....Siebel, Peoplesoft, Oracle (those are the ones I'm familar with) are all browser based. Sure a lot of the world (read: most of the world) is still running off

  • Things that make you go hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SwashbucklingCowboy ( 727629 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @09:37AM (#14980116)
    Google gives away 2 GB with a Gmail account, but only 100 MB for web access. Why the difference?

    • Re:Things that make you go hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cinnamoninja ( 958754 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @09:49AM (#14980185)
      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
      • Plus, email compresses amazingly well. That 2GB (note: I'm fast approaching 3GB on mine, don't know if this is true for all) doesn't really translate into 2GB of disk space. Most email is still just text, or HTML, while webpages often are loaded with pictures which don't compress very well.

        Also, gmail is a pain to use for bulk file storage/transfer between friends. Small attachment sizes, etc. Googlepages would be ideal for putting up say 2GB of mp3s to share, and all of that WOULD get used, and used often.

  • I want this! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SpaghettiPattern ( 609814 )
    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.

  • Makes sense.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rob Kaper ( 5960 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @10:23AM (#14980416) Homepage
    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.
  • 100 MB of free storage space on Google's servers.

    all it cost you is your privacy.

  • Save As... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @10:55AM (#14980722) Homepage Journal
    It's so exciting when a company like Google can be such the object of obsession that when it rolls out a "New Document" feature, that's front page (pun intended) news.
  • FYI, the site is http://pages.google.com/ [google.com] From the site, you will learn a few things. 1) No technical knowledge is required. You can build high-quality web pages without having to learn HTML or use complex software. 2) What you see is what you'll get. You can edit your pages right in your browser, seeing exactly how your finished product will look every step along the way. 3) You dont need to worry about hosting. Your web pages will live on your own site at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com/ [googlepages.com]

  • So I googled for "Pages Launches" already... (Score:3, Funny)

    by thewils ( 463314 ) on Thursday March 23, 2006 @02:49PM (#14982601) Journal
    Now what?
  • I have to say that if nothing else, Google Pages has been very *fun*. Or at least a complete waste of spare time.

    I mean, I couldn't justify wasting bandwidth on something like a Freedonia Tourist Site [googlepages.com], but now, the whole world can enjoy the follies of a small country run by a ruthless dictator with a grease-paint mustache ...

  • I suspect that the anonymous submitter and the Slashdot editor got the story slightly incorrect. I've had gmail and gtalk for a while. But I went to the googlepages.com site and added myself to the waitlist a few minutes ago. I noticed my userid and password information was already imputted to the appropriate login box. Well, I hit the login button, and whadaya know, I now have a working Google Page account.

    Either Google has already set aside a web account for Gmail/Gtalk users, or they randomly prearran

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