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.

Comments

file hosting limit

[Seoulstriker]

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

Re:file hosting limit

[garcia]

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.

Re:file hosting limit

[Breakfast Pants]

Google needs to enable users to have wiki like functionality, and an easy way to keep parts of the wiki private (makes for the ultimate PIM.. with full revision history). They also need to get the IM support they have within GMail into the personalized webpage. If they can do these things, they will finally bring what most hackers have had on their personal servers for the last 5 years to the masses (you do run a Jabber server and at least one client with a web front-end, don't you?).

Re:file hosting limit

[diegocgteleline.es]

http://pages.google.com works fine for me.

Re:file hosting limit

[Ossifer]

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

In the 30 seconds I used it, it:

• told me another user had locked me out
• told me image resizing was unavailable, try again in 30 seconds
• crashed my firefox

I call that a usage limitation...

Re:file hosting limit

[mahdi13]

http://pages.google.com works fine for me.

Not if you try logging on with your gmail login, how many slashdotters and their family's have a gmail account you think?

Re:file hosting limit

[generic-man]

IM on a web page? Oh please god no. I'd rather read someone's page without having windows pop up saying "hey dude I saw you were on my page, what's up?"

(Cue Googlebot response: "You can turn it off if you don't like it")

Re:file hosting limit

[Elixon]

Why to limit data transfer? They can include the number of hits/transfered data in the pageRank, right? So why to forbid such as valuable pageRank factor?

BTW Does the Google monitors the slashdot on regular basis? If yes, so hey guys! I was just joking saying that the next thing is GoogleHosting - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177070&cid=146 95299 ! And please! Do not rename the Internet to GoogleNet - that was a joke too! :-O

Re:file hosting limit

[MacJedi]

See: meebo

Re:file hosting limit

[Derf the]

We've SlashDoted a google service, how many times are we going to be able to say that!

Re:file hosting limit

[Breakfast Pants]

No no no.. this is just IM on your personal portal. Say you are a student at the library, you can have chats open from your homepage.

How good is it

[HBergeron]

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

[TheNoxx]

Good question... but quite frankly, the days of Frontpage being useful, or this Google page editor, are more or less over. If you have a real use for your site, such as a business, then chances are you'll hire someone for the design and maintenance. The days of amateur looking webpages being of any use to a legitimate company have come to an end; similarly, 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.

Re:How good is it

[Eightyford]

Does this replace the soon to be discontinued Frontpage for the unsophisticated user?

I'd say this is more of an upgrade for myspace, geocities, and tridpod. Frontpage may be ugly, but it is more than just a wysiwyg editor.

Re:How good is it

[NickFitz]

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 has knocked together a page in which all of the above flaws can be seen.

Re:How good is it

[hcdejong]

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

[kfg]

. . .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

[diegocgteleline.es]

Oh well, Google has managed to write a somewhat-crappy frontpage equivalent with undo/redo functionality, autosave...if someone had told me that he was trying to do such thing using javashit and making it work even with IE 5.5 i'd have told him he was crazy. Standards can come later (BTW, it's in beta stage), the difficult part is there.

Re:How good is it

[NickFitz]

I've done WYSIWYG Content Management Systems for several clients using just JavaScript, DOM manipulation and XMLHttpRequest, with your choice of server-side stuff (ASP, PHP, JSP... whatever). Worked in IE5.5 and 6, Firefox and more recent versions of Opera; produced W3C standards-compliant code; even cleaned up the garbage that results if people paste in Word docs. It's really not that difficult, which is why I think it's pretty laughable that this is the best Google have managed.

Re:How good is it

[Farfromlosin]

"Somebody should tell them that elements are very GeoCities 1997"

{html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"}

You were close, they are soooo 1999....

Re:How good is it

[1shoonya0]

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.

I disagree. Now with domain names so cheap and the ability to host stuff at your home with a decent DSL connection, I see more people getting into hosting their own websites. I have personaly helped two of my friends to set these up in the past three months.

Re:How good is it

[poot_rootbeer]

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?

Re:How good is it

[honor, not armor]

Did Drew write his own CSS on that page? Because it looks to me like a bunch of stuff Google threw in to handle a lot of different situations, and it's inlined. And it makes up roughly 90% of the source code... that's a lot of wasted bandwidth.

Re:How good is it

[NickFitz]

No, that's the nonsense spewed out by Google. If you go to Drew's own post on the subject at All in the <Head> you'll find some very nice valid code, complete with print stylesheet.

(The only reason I posted a link to Drew's Google page was that I'd read about this on his site just before it appeared here at /. and had looked under the hood of his example page. As he says, "Signup was painless, editing was painless, publishing was painless. The resultant markup? Painful.")

Re:How good is it

[mjm1231]

Then a wiki is the answer. There are lots of free ones that would probably meet your needs. I like pbwiki.com, myself. But you can look over the features of other sites at http://www.freewiki.info/

Re:How good is it

[prell]

A Microsoft rep just told me this morning that Frontpage will be renamed to something like "Sharepoint site administrator" -- something with "Sharepoint" in the title, and a step away from generic web publishing, anyway. And the rep said that this was to be expected because that's what "Frontpage is anyway." So perhaps Microsoft really is pulling away from consumer web-page creation. I can see why they would: how can you justify offline creation of webpages to people who are perceived to be blog-addicted? It's all online now. Well, that's what I'd suspect them of thinking, anyway.

Though, I'm sure you can still create HTML with MS Word :-)

Re:How good is it

[Anonymous Coward]

"Does this replace the soon to be discontinued Frontpage for the unsophisticated user? Is MS retreating from the field just as Google takes it?"
- FrontPage isn't being discontinued, MS is changing the name to Expression Web Designer.

Re:How good is it

[hcdejong]

A wiki also seems overkill for a few static pages plus some photos. I've got the tools I need for this job (Dreamweaver plus the thumbnail-generator-du-jour), so why introduce the overhead of a wiki (which seems to require server-side processing) or a blog?

Re:How good is it

[RemovableBait]

It's actually going to be called "Windows SharePoint Designer" and will not be aimed at consumers. I'm not allowed to tell you how I know this, but I'm sure you can figure it out ;)

Oops!

[trentblase]

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.

Re:Oops!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good lord. We Slashdotted Google. I guess those rumours about the impending death of the internet were true...

Re:Oops!

[EddieBurkett]

I guess those rumours about the impending death of the internet were true...

Per yesterday's Dilbert, its just that the internet is now full.

Re:Oops!

[marcello_dl]

This is not because of anything you did...

Those googlish infidels better start to acknowledge the power of slashdot *grin*

Re:Oops!

[nirnimesh]

I hope it's not because of the slashdotting.

Re:Oops!

[psycln]

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.

That, i believe, is what people refer to as the digg effect

Re:Oops!

[SubTexel]

Lol, just empty it into the trash can.. ;)

Re:Oops!

[Anonymous Coward]

With the greater number of people using Slashdot, that more likely occurred after it was posted to Slashdot.

Re:Oops!

[Daytona955i]

That, i believe, is what people refer to as the digg effect

You must be new here. Slashdot has been slashdotting sites long before these annoying digg users ever came around.

Re:Oops!

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone that reads Digg should be banned from using a computer and forced to go back to elementary school. The only thing that Digg has achieved is creating the dumbest community on the Internet. Even the idiocy that is MySpace looks like a community of geniuses compared to Digg.

Re:Oops!

[heinousjay]

Awww, you take it personally. That's awesome. No, wait, retarded. Yeah, that was the word I meant... retarded.

Re:Oops!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny shit. Slashdot needs a new meme. In the finest Slashdot tradition, we'll just dupe an old one and give it a slightly different name.

Behold the new meme ... "Digg confirms it. Slashdot is dying".

Re:Oops!

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, not everyone can live up to the stunning erudition of anonymous Slashdot trolls, such as yourself.

Just what we need

[RagingFuryBlack]

Woohoo. Lets see if google can pull this off better then freewebs. I hope google is prepared to deal with millions of 12 year olds creating seizure pages =D.

For a free service its not bad

[majortom1981]

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.

Re:For a free service its not bad

[Saulo Achkar]

"Your pages do not have any adds..." now while it's still Beta. Just wait and it will be filled with Google Ads, as we see today in Gmail...

Re:For a free service its not bad

[generic-man]

Yeah, and when Geocities started all you had to do was place a link to geocities.com in your HTML. They've since tried every advertising style in the book: pop-ups, pop-unders, layers of ads, banners, and so on. I fully expect Google to do the same.

Re:For a free service its not bad

[bedroll]

"Your pages do not have any adds..." now while it's still Beta. Just wait and it will be filled with Google Ads, as we see today in Gmail...

Wha? Sorry, I just don't see how GMail is "filled" with ads. They show up in two or three locations, but they're easily ignored text. In the case of the Web Clip bar they tend to be understated, yet they're labelled as advertisements so you can still tell. The most intrusive thing about them is that Google searches the contents of your email to display them. Unless maybe you're in a pool of users that's getting significantly more ads put on their page, or I'm in a pool that's getting significantly less, I just don't think that the word "filled" is appropriate. Maybe "sprinkled" or "peppered". Who knows, GMail is still in Beta, so maybe you are seeing more or maybe they'll put more on there before they release it (if ever).

I would expect a similar peppering of ads rolled out sometime during the beta of Google pages.

Re:For a free service its not bad

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

And of course there will be restrictions on what ad programs you can use on your pages (Google only, that sort of thing). And, there will probably be zero scripting support... But hey, it's free...

Re:For a free service its not bad

[generic-man]

I'd rather not be "peppered" any time soon, thank you very much

SPONSORED LINKS
Buy "pepper" on eBay
best prices with buy it now
ebay.com

Chief pepper Supplier PRC
Planter, processor, exporter of Whi
-te & Black pepper, large capacity
www.lichee.org

Cheney Funny Stuff
Show your friends that you agree wi
-th Jon Stewart
wearyourpolitics.biz

SPONSORED LINKS

Re:For a free service its not bad

[bedroll]

I would reply to you in Yahoo!'s style of advertising, but this darned thing doesn't let me post flash and animated gifs.

Re:For a free service its not bad

[Moofie]

CURSE those free (beer) services!

You know the expression "beggars can't be choosers"? This is what that expression is talking about.

Re:For a free service its not bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that there is a CSS Class called #adsense' in the Style definitions I think we can cleary see what direction were going.

Re:For a free service its not bad

[generic-man]

That is Yahoo!'s style of advertising. Yahoo! bought Overture, the company which invented text advertising on web pages. Google merely took Overture's model and applied it to market areas where Overture wouldn't go.

Of course, to those who think Yahoo! is nothing more than a hideous portal site, that's a normal reaction.

Re:For a free service its not bad

[WaterBreath]

I'm pretty sure I've seen some animated banner GIFs from AdSense around lately. Maybe even light Flash. I used to not block Google ads with Adblock, because they were so unobtrusive. But if animated GIFs or even light Flash ads become commonplace, that will change in a heartbeat.

Browser Support

[Nikoth]

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

[MentalMooMan]

I like the message you get when you do try to use opera:

Oops!
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:Browser Support

[bartyboy]

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

Re:Browser Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Pffft, why use Opera then? Opera is behind the times, crashes, and doesn't render correctly many times. That's why they had to start giving it away, nobody wants it.

Re:Browser Support

[ashot]

/sarcasm

Patent violation!

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't this violate US Patent number 7,000,180?

Re:Patent violation!

[ahsile]

Heh. You beat me to it.

Amazing that we have a system that violates a patent posted about right after a posting about the patent. It's perfect!

Re:Patent violation!

[duerra]

BRILLIANT!

Already plenty of tools out there

[CRCulver]

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 . If you can use Wordpress 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.

Re:Already plenty of tools out there

[Traegorn]

It's not about whether or not someone has done it before, but rather whether someone has made it less intimidating before.

Grandma won't pick it up if it seems too complicated - even if it really isn't. Google has the public image to pull this off better than most. It's not about being new - it's about appearing easy.

Re:Already plenty of tools out there

[JaseOne]

Wordpress is a usability nightmare even for advanced users it is a pain to use and that isn't for a lack of the community to try to get improvements made it is just the way they want it for some reason.

From what little I've played with it, Google Pages seems a lot more usability friendly and lets you create pages in a much more natural way.

Re:Already plenty of tools out there

[Trixter]

(once grandson has installed the backend)

Yes, and every single grandmother in the world who wants to do this has a tech-savvy grandson. Not.

It doesn't matter -- I am quite technically savvy and yet I still use the free Wordpress service because I don't want to pay a hosting company to have a blog.

ORM Patented - Google Introduces Page Creator?

[corcoranp]

ORM - Online Rich Media is patented today and Google comes out with a page creator???? I can see the storm brewing already.

Re:ORM Patented - Google Introduces Page Creator?

[slimjim8094]

I just read an article about that. Crap, how long is that patent going to stand? Against Google?
Yes, this is probably redundant, but I think it makes a point, albeit mainly for that patent article. It will be interesting to see how they (the holding company) deal with Google "infringing" on their technology. As well as M$. Windows Live anyone?

Re:ORM Patented - Google Introduces Page Creator?

[IflyRC]

This should be fun to watch. Hopefully we'll get a front row seat and be served popcorn!

This is Google's way of saying....

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw you Balthasar!

The Shotgun Effect

[eldavojohn]

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++ anyone?). I just created my homepage 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.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[Moby Cock]

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.

I prefer the analogy of: "Throw stuff up and see what sticks."

Mostly because a lot of tech companies offer products that are really regurgitated slop.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[tpgp]

Microsoft and Google have this in common. They both did one or two things extremely well which resulted in insane success.

What did Microsoft do extremely well?

(I guess you could say "ruthlessly crush the competition" - but I'm presuming you mean something in the field of I.T.)

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[resprung]

There is no master plan.

Google is just a millionaire on a spree.

A bunch of their offerings are currently so trashy you wonder why they've put the embarrassments online:
- Google Video, the ugliest storefront on the web
- Google Pack
- Google Talk

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[skubeedooo]

What did Microsoft do extremely well?

Excel

Visual Studio

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[Guanix]

Excel and VBA.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

VBA? Don't forget Bob

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[Daytona955i]

VBA? Surely you're joking....

I'll grant you excel though.... Microsoft's one good program and possibly the only reason to not completely switch to Open Office.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[Imsdal]

What did Microsoft do extremely well?

Establishing GUI guidlines, communicating them clearly and *sticking to them*.

Yes, they basically stole most of the GUI components from Apple who stole it from ... who stole it from ... We all know that story. Nothing revolutionary about that.

But what they *did* do was making pretty darn sure every MS product stuck to the guidlines. This was in very sharp contrast to products from Borland, Oracle and Lotus, to name a few competitors who have created god-awful GUIs through the years. (In fact, I developed Oracle Forms stuff ten years ago. Their *only* GUI recommendation was to not do things the way Microsoft recommended it.)

What MS did before 1995 was strangely successful but generally evil enough for them to get the reputation they have in the /. crowd today. Too few people here realise that since then they have done a bunch of things extremely well. Other posters mentioned Excel. I maintain that it is the best piece of desktop software ever written.

And, finally: yeah, I know, they have done a bunch a crappy things as well. IE. The stability of Win'95 and subsequent OS'es. Security loopholes. We all know that. But if the open source community could see the strengths as well as the weaknesses and emulate them, they could possibly get somewhere.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[log0n]

Google Talk rocks. Completely. I imagine that if you think it's an embarassment it's because you just don't have anyone to contact through it so you don't really use it. Not intended as a putdown, but being able to message coworkers, friends/family from the say window that I keep my email in (it's never closed) is just great.

To me (and I'm old school about a lot of what I do - I say that to show that I appreciate change and am not an old kurmudgeon) google's renovations on a standard are very welcome. I hate using non-threaded email progams now because of gmail, I hate having artificual quotas and rediculous attachment limits, I like searching for things in the same manner that I have learned to search the web so that I find them. While I prefer no ads, Google's are a perfect balance of them making their money, me getting free services and nonintrusiveness. And, they're halfway useful.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[darthnoodles]

Hey! There was nothing wrong with J++. I bought it.

The fact that it was the academic license, came with Windows NT 4 Wokstation and only cost $47 CAD MAY have something to do with it, but I did buy it.

I don't think I ever installed J++. But it sure was a sweet deal for NT 4.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[drinkypoo]

I like Excel more than any other Microsoft application/program ever made, with the possible exception of Microsoft Flight Simulator (I like Mechwarrior IV more, but it wasn't actually written by MS, just distributed by them) but Excel is fucking lame. It has stupid artificial limits (like the numbers of rows & columns) and the last version of office that isn't all crapped up (97) was not written to work well with windows. For example, if you have multiple displays, and you put an app on the secondary display, when you open a pulldown menu, it opens on the primary display. Only the best! These days it's always opening up sidebars and popping up messages to tell me things I already know.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[iamlucky13]

Google is just a millionaire on a spree

They do kind of come across that way, don't they. Time Magazine did a somewhat interesting article on Larry and Sergei recently. The millionaire on a spending spree is the overall impression I was left with, although the article presented them as having goals and plans. One of the showcases of the article was the way they develop new projects (most slashdotters probably know Google employees spend 70% of their time on assigned projects, 20% on ideas that seem good, and 10% on whatever the heck seems interesting...the last is reportedly how gmail and google moon happened). You bring your ideas to your manager. If they like it, they take it to the next level. Then it goes before the co-founders. That's basically is throwing it up to see what sticks. Them it's gets thrown up to the public.

The most interesting quote from the article was something to the effect of "(before our public filing) we actually wanted to appear uncoordinated, and it worked. The competition was thinking 'these guys are idiots' while we were secretly growing."

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[resprung]

Good call :-)

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[DeafByBeheading]

But what they *did* do was making pretty darn sure every MS product stuck to the guidlines.

Erm, Windows Media Player?

That said, most of their stuff does behave rather well. I can't believe that they let the WMP people get away with this (and I don't even use it; I stick with Media Player Classic..

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[DeafByBeheading]

What did Microsoft do extremely well?

Excel

Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2k3 was bloated and awkward, although 2k5 is a joy to use in comparison. I suggest anyone still on 2k3 move to 2k5. The Express Editions are free (as in beer) to download until November from Microsoft.com.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[Imsdal]

Good point. I shouldn't have said "every MS product", I should have said "every major MS product", where "major" is basically the Office Suite, SQL Server and most development tools.

There are some atrocities out there (some of the games, in particular, comes to mind) but overall, the GUI quality is by far the best in the business. That says morte about the rest of the business, unfortunately...

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[killjoe]

Excel was just a rip off of quattro pro. Quattro was much better then excel but it cost more after excel was bundled with office.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[Yusaku Godai]

While I agree that these are all nice features, they're not exactly innovations. Well, I guess they're innovations for webmail, but otherwise I've had threaded e-mail and instant search for years :0

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[darkpurpleblob]

Yep. We still use Visual J++ for JavaScript debugging with Internet Explorer at work. Works a charm.

Re:The Shotgun Effect

[jc42]

What did Microsoft do extremely well?

(I guess you could say "ruthlessly crush the competition" ...)

Well, I'd say it differently: "Marketing". ;-)

Recall that Microsoft started as a subcontractor to IBM, at a time when there were a zillion small startups selling "personal computers" that mostly ran CP/M. The IBM PC was really just a case of the 200-pound gorilla waking up, looking around, and saying "OK, you guys have shown that there's a market; now stand aside while a real businessman shows you how it's done."

There was universal agreement that PC/DOS was really just a ripoff of CPM, generally similar, but with the details different so that customers couldn't easily jump to the competition. People in the computer biz roundly denounced PC/DOS as technically inferior. IBM/Microsoft knew that, and didn't care, because they had something better than good software: a marketing budget of several humdred million dollars, and the three letters "IBM". The fact that their software was the crappiest on the market was utterly irrelevant, given that their ad budget was larger than the total operating budgets of all their competitors combined.

This has been the Microsoft story all along. Wait until the little guys show there's a demand for something new. Come out with a crappy, incompatible ripoff, and use your huge marketing budget (and control of the OS) to impose it on a market that really doesn't much know or care about quality.

This is a case where "innovate" literally means "make small changes in someone else's product, just enough to be incompatible". There's no reason to pioneer anything; that's risky. Much better to let someone else take the risk, and then buy them out, or take over their market if they have some silly idea that they can sell their own product in what's really your own market.

The computer biz has mostly worked this way for half a century now. There are few signs that it will change soon.

Page Locked.

[bharatm]

I logged into Pages. wen i read the post on Digg.. thats around 30 mins. back and Google Pages was working fine. But now when i log in it says "Page Locked" "The Page is locked by another user" "Return to the Site Overview" "Break the lock and edit.." Break the Lock... What are Locks....?

Re:Page Locked.

[luder]

I don't know if it has any relation, but when I try to open http://gmailuser.googlepages.com/ I get "Not Found Error 404"

Re:Page Locked.

[Professor_UNIX]

Break the Lock... What are Locks....?

They are used to bring a boat from a waterway at one elevation to a waterway at another elevation. Usually found in canals and such. If it's going uphill then the boat goes into the lock, the doors shut, and water fills up the lock until it is at a higher elevation, then the other doors open and it floats on its way. The reverse is done for going downhill.

Oh, you mean locks in a computer sense? They stop two competing processes from writing to the same area of disk/memory/whatever. A process locks what it is working on and then releases the lock when its done so another process can lock the area and write to it. If two processes were to write to an area at the same time without any kind of flow control they'd just end up overwriting each other.

Re:Page Locked.

[Finuvir]

That's not a literal URL. It means that once you set up your google homepage the URL for it will be of that form, but with the text "gmailuser" replaced by your actual Google username (the bit that comes before @gmail.com in your gmail address). You'll get a 404 if the page hasn't been created yet.

Re:Page Locked.

[assassinator42]

And, how do you set it up?

Re:Page Locked.

[Finuvir]

And, how do you set it up?

If you'd rather post your question as a comment and wait for a reponse rather than, say, reading the story summary, then that's up to you. I generally recommend against it.

Set up your pages at http://pages.google.com/. You need a Google account to sign in.

patented!

[Anonymous Coward]

Balthasar isn't gonna let this one slip by!

Sample Page

[JFlex]

Just a quick sample page I through together.

Re:Sample Page

[secolactico]

And that's got to be the funniest pic I've seen this week.

No Safari support yet

[Chris_Jefferson]

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

Re:No Safari support yet

[Quixotic]

with regards to safari support, i believe it's because safari doesnt properly support all the features needed to have wysiwyg editable content. This is why support for in-browser wysiwyg in safari is a bit hit or miss at the moment.

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/tinymce/docs/compatib lity_chart.html

http://www.fckeditor.net/safari.html

Re:No Safari support yet

[NatasRevol]

Try this:

sudo defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Restart Safari

Select Debug>User Agent>Windows MSIE 6.0

Go to http://pages.google.com/

Haven't tested out the functionality yet, but it views the page...

Re:No Safari support yet

[NatasRevol]

To reply to myself...

It doesn't seem to have much functionality. You can't open or create a new page.

Maybe next week.

Re:No Safari support yet

[Anonymous Coward]

How funny that the screenshot on the Page Creator homepage distinctly has Safari widgets.

Images

[platos_beard]

Now if they let you paste in an image, that would be really impressive. Probably the single most inconvenient thing about editing on the web is that once you copy an image, you need to create an image file, then browse or type in the path to upload it, then place it on the page. IMHO, simplifying that is more important than WYSIWYG for usability (I'm thinking Wiki text or ReST, not html).

great for targeted spamming

[dutchwhizzman]

username@gmail.com 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.

Re:great for targeted spamming

[TedCheshireAcad]

Perhaps this justifies GMail's spam filter.

Re:great for targeted spamming

[glsunder]

True, however, if 100+ gmail addresses get the same email then it's probably spam and the host it came from then has a good chance of being a spam bot or open relay*. Maybe google's using it as bait: "Come on... send your spam to 100,000 gmail accounts, I dare ya."

* yeah, open relays still exist. Crazy, eh?

Re:great for targeted spamming

[hcdejong]

Who wants to target their spamming? Sending mail to *@gmail.com is a lot less effort, and it's not as if sending mail costs anything.

Re:great for targeted spamming

[Anonymous Coward]

My gmail account get nailed by 100s of SPAM messages each day (don't ask why....DOH!). After spending a few days tagging things as spam, gmail does an excellent job in catching the junk. I might get one or two messages a month in my inbox and I've only had one false hit in the last 3 months.

I almost feel comfortable publishing my gmail account in newgroups again.

Re:great for targeted spamming

[diegocgteleline.es]

Except that google alreadyhaves a spam filter that works great...

Re:great for targeted spamming

[bartok]

After reading your comment I went to delete the page I had created and I got an error message saying I can't delete it.

Re:great for targeted spamming

[Anonymous Coward]

just don't publish a 'home' page

username.googlepages.com will 404 just like nonexistant users

username.googlepages.com/ilikecats will still return the page you created aobut tiddles

Re:great for targeted spamming

[bkissi01]

You can't delete your home page, but you can unpublish it. Check the box next to your home page then under "More Actions" select unpublish. This effectively does the same thing as deleting your home page.

Sued by previous article owners

[LiquidCoooled]

Doesn't this conflict heavily with the proceeding patent story?

Why Google is still cool

[theskipper]

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?

Re:Why Google is still cool

[Anonymous Coward]

How bizarre. My ex-girlfriend's land-lady discovered her ferret. Said ferret now lives with me and other weasel children. What a strange coincidence though.

Re:Why Google is still cool

[cerberusss]

My ex-girlfriend's land-lady discovered her ferret

Ah. So that's what she calls it. Her "ferret".

Odd

[broothal]

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...

Re:Odd

[LiquidCoooled]

I'm getting this:

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.

Re:Odd

[qsqueeq]

I like this one...

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.

Re:Odd

[qsqueeq]

Ha! Google has been slashdotted.

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

[elrous0]

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

No opera either

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:No opera either

[1tsm3]

Well, so is the case for Yahoo Geocities. Nothing new to complain here... move on.

Re:No opera either

[thpdg]

Originally, gmail didn't work with Firefox either. Then it started to work with the plain HTML mode. Finally, it all came together, and has been fabulous, ever since.

Nope, no Opera 8.5 support either

[cogg]

Google said: 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

Overall idea is to make more money

[vivekg]

Yup make more money from Free Web Hosting. According to netcraft "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).

Re:Overall idea is to make more money

[Uber Banker]

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

Maybe. I think they could also boost their AdSense program quite a bit too. Many many bloggers now have Google ads, so why shouldn't non-blog homepages (what I think this caters for). Just automatically add, or make it really really easy for users to add, a Google AdSense list to their page, perhaps for what the user is interested in, says the links "This person (XXX.googlepages.com) is interested in YYY, click here for ZZZ retailers/further sources of information." As well as more estoric linking of interests - someone's blog, webpage, email (and websearches w/ cookies) - could tie up some nice targetted ads.

Re:Overall idea is to make more money

[MikeBabcock]

What, you wouldn't pay to host your site on Google's server farms?

I sure would.

Even better, you can pay to have your servers replicated automatically to provide better service where your clients are. Server gets replicated x1 to China and x6 to west coast.

We're talking about a company that does algorithms really well and does hosting really well. Should they sell hosting services? Sounds kinda boring for Google, but its right up their alley.

Re:Overall idea is to make more money

[moosesocks]

Even better, you can pay to have your servers replicated automatically to provide better service where your clients are. Server gets replicated x1 to China and x6 to west coast.

Um. No. That's a terrible idea. You'd have to make sure that your content is legal and kosher in every country your data could possibly be stored in. I'd daresay that that's a frighteningly daunting task. (Especially for china who will censor just about anything). Besides, how much benefit do you really expect to gain by hosting an english language site in china?

As for automatic domestic colocation, Akamai's been doing that for YEARS, and they're quite good at it. Google's never been one to purposely invade a crowded industry that is already adequately serving its market. I highly doubt that there's much google can bring to the table that Akamai and co. cannot.

A sterling job on the XSS defenses though

[buro9]

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 already because the security gives me enough peace of mind to not regret doing so.

Re:A sterling job on the XSS defenses though

[Anonymous Coward]

What about , etc.? Did it strip out MS "behavior:" and inline JS crap from CSS?

Re:A sterling job on the XSS defenses though

[Quixotic]

and even if there was a successful XSS attack, it's on googlepages.com, so that should also help limit the scope of what could be done.

Re:A sterling job on the XSS defenses though

[ricky.zhou]

Actually, if you use the file upload function, they perform no script checking at all (this is probably why they used a separate domain).

Misunderstanding of google strategy

[Danathar]

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.

Re:Misunderstanding of google strategy

[Programmer_In_Traini]

or maybe it is that you give too much credit to google.

They allow their employees to work on personal projects for a reason, that avoids them to create a R&D department if all employees are already doing something on their own.

But trust me, i know google is a "dont do evil" company, which is good, but they do all they do for a reason, google has a goal and is working toward it (good or evil). It has shareholders to respond to and as such, will promote any ideas that seems profitable, obviously. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying google has a huge master plan of world domination somewhere but they certainly don't go through the hassle of making a new app available worldwide just see where it goes, its because it matches THEIR (business) plan and they bet on making a profit out of it...in whatever way it is that they make a profit.

Re:Misunderstanding of google strategy

[MrCam]

I think they do have a strategy in mind for this beta and I don't think it is webhosting. I think this is just a test of how well they can handle server side applications. I can see them ramping up the features and making it more robust, maybe even the ability to create PDF's or a format like that. I think this is there test for an online Word processor with all your files online and editable and emailable from any browser. I think this is Googles first step at real web based applications.

Re:Misunderstanding of google strategy

[krod77]

I am almost positive they have some sort of plan in mind, perhaps not a elaborate plan, but at least a plan on how it can benefit Google.

Re:Misunderstanding of google strategy

[elventear]

I think that Google has a long term strategy, which is amassing the biggest collection of diverse information in the world and later on use machine learning/data mining techniques to gather useful information.

Today they have services like GMail, GMail managing your own domain, GTalk where you can save the your chat logs, Blogspot, Google Groups, Orkut, Google Videos. Now they have added the service of hosting Webpages. I figure, first of all, it's easier to control if they own it; at least they can try to make sure that all the info is legit in the sense that it comes from a real user and, therefore, the information is useful. Also, they can start adding features that will make the life easier for the data mining algorithms to extract data.

Following this reasoning, I think that in the future we will see more cool services from Google that will involve channeling/storing/guarding our precious data somehow (Even if its pics from your pet Ferret). If this were true I think that Google is going in a direction where marketing will be it's core source of revenue.

Re:Misunderstanding of google strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful? Sure was when the exact same comment was posted on the pc-world article link. (unless this is the same guy)

Re:Misunderstanding of google strategy

[Senzei]

Marketing has always been Google's core source of revenue.

One of the other replies to the GP talked about this being the result of personal project time. I think that is where things start for this. Above all else google is about selling targetted advertisements. They do pretty well with search, they are even better with it in gmail.

The goal, as I see it, in offering all these services is to get a working single sign on feature. Google wants to be able to see your web page, blog, email, searches, chat logs, shopping history, travel trends, and whatever other information they can get their hands on to tailor ads specifically to you. If they have the best web mail/blog/... on the market then that information is available to them.

Re:Misunderstanding of google strategy

[nsebban]

...till the day they add GoogleAds to every page made with this tool.

Re:Misunderstanding of google strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so, businesses don't have to make a profit, nor satisfy their shareholders, or spend effort on projoects that jibe with their overall goals.

Companies that stick around for a long time generally do those things more than they don't, but even there there's exceptions.

It's the same mistake people make in believing that evolutions causes every animal to do things that further its reproductive success, or that all behavior is the best possible way of doing whatever it is doing.

Those ideas only hold any salt when you step back and look at all of them as an agregate but totally breaks down when you get to the individual/company level. There's no mystical or magical force "compelling" Google to do any of that in the here and now.

Over time the consequences of actions will shape behavior, but at any given moment, anything can happen.

Not bad....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

This can be nice....even for a technical user. Not all of us want to run a webserver at home. Some of us pay for hosting or web pages.

I just tried it out

[Anonymous Coward]

with ie7 beta 2.

I told my girl "hey, come see I'm going to make this here webpage for you" .. and then I logged into Google page creator (fyi my google name has nine characters) .. and well the default page title was "username's Ho"! Now I hope thats because I was using IE7 Beta 2, or maybe it was my username length either way .. the girls not happy.

Hmm maybe I could sue. Also the page functions dont work in IE7 Beta 2 (note to pagecreators or IE's developers).

Re:I just tried it out

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure the Microsoft and Google engineering teams have printed out your post and have issued a corporate-wide memo out of it to make sure that you can use Page Creator BETA with IE7 BETA.

Google the new Yahoo?

[mmport80]

Next: Google doesn't rate search going forward, passes up chance to buy small innovative search engine - which turns out the be the next big thing :)

Re-edited summary for Google's Dark side...

[Anonymous Coward]

...if Google is evil (censoring etc etc), the article summary would have read like this:

Google has finally published their own AJAX web-publishing application called Google Page Creator. The app is getting photos, information and files you want published ; it won't publish in the standardized blog format, however. The published site is only hosted at the google domain http://gmailuser.googlepages.com/. There are a few templates and page formats to work from, and it looks almost WYSIWYG. The published HTML does have leftover fragments from editing pages repeatedly, but it could be called clean if you could look over that. For technical diehards, you could edit the HTML by hand, but who does that nowadays. As usual, there is a Google Groups page available for the service. It could take 30 seconds to get a rudimentary page online, but this will ofcourse take much longer for any real stuff.

...

Compared to wiki engines...

[michalf]

I have tried to create a few pages and the only conclusion is: the interface and features are very very poor compared to any wiki engine you can find at several wiki farms (mostly these wikimedia-based). google allows you to customize look&feel a bit and that is in +. but for me - usability is below average - I am a great wiki fan.

googlepages is beta (surprised?) and I hope interface will evolve. imho this is not the way I would like to create my pages.

we are currently working on a similar system based on wiki engine. and I can tell you - number of options is just not comparable. but I wonder if we will have eg. feed reader/integrator, flickr integration, blog integration etc. with googlepages.

I suppose eventually you will be allowed to put adsense on googlepages. ;-)

summarising: googlapages seem to be good for simple, personal pages. but I can not image creating more than dozen of pages with it.

michal ;-)

Re:Compared to wiki engines...

[Uber Banker]

...we are currently working on a similar system based on wiki engine...

Do you have a site this is running on and people can try it out? IMHO one of Google's annoyances is that it puts out barely functional software, but while that software is lacking in features, they still put it out and it becomes one of their strengths. Get a prototype running, and even if it's basic it's good enough, and can be added to later, thus stealing a march on competition and locking into a philosophy at their websearch core, software should be constantly innovated upon and improved. Gmail, flickr, news, google.com/ig and others all being examples. It seems to work pretty well so far.

If you could make a public prototype (if the retail/individual consumer market is your target) and go head-to-head?!

Re:Compared to wiki engines...

[jacksonj04]

Minor point - Flickr is Yahoo! and not Google. I would prefer it Googlyfied in place of Picasa (Ugh), but we can't have everything.

Re:Compared to wiki engines...

[michalf]

in my case the reason is simpe: we could not survive slashdotting ;-) (yet) but first half-public beta-sites will be launched within next few months.

such a move requires quite a massive infrastructure and I do not believe in going head-to-head with google. in fact wiki-based solution is a very different approach and there is a room for all of us - at least I can not see any conflict here. anyway - please do not treat my posts as advertising - I am just sharing my thoughts as a software developer.

but look at gmail: it did not change the way many people read mail. none of my friends changed her/his primary email to google. neither did gtalk. let us be honest: although google services are good, they are not revolutionary. and they do not have to - they are ALL TO INCREASE ADS INCOME in the end.

well - we will see.

michal

Re:Compared to wiki engines...

[DeathBunny]

The big advantage it has over Wiki's.... NO F***ing stupid wiki markup! I've tried several times to setup internal Wiki's at work. Wiki markup has always been a big show stopper for user acceptance.

Re:Compared to wiki engines...

[cmpalmer]

I don't think they made it for you. They made it for my Mom.

Seriously, anyone who knows what a Wiki is and how to set one up is probably not in Google's target audience for this, it is more likely to be a an accessory to blogger and a way for casual users to easily set up a web page.

However, it will be interesting to see just what kind of stuff is allowed here...

Re:Compared to wiki engines...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, whopps, sorry. This Web2.0 thing is complicated.

Re:Compared to wiki engines...

[garaged]

google is not responsible for not being bad in business like other people or companies If they can do something, why can't they ?? is not ilegal !

OOPS

[Anonymous Coward]

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. We've slashdotted Google!

In the long term...

[nmg196]

Who wants to bet that the final version will have compulsory adsense or sponsored links down the right hand side?

The HTML/CSS code is appauling. They haven't even bothered to put the CSS in a seperate file, so if you create a multipage site, it's going to keep downloading the came old crap again and again.

Re:In the long term...

[ynohoo]

Who wants to bet that the final version will have compulsory adsense or sponsored links down the right hand side?

Who cares? It's what I would expect from a free service.

What I hate is how GeoCities was crippled by Yahoo with their traffic cap - your site can only get a pathetic number of hits per day before being shut off. I haven't bothered maintaining my GeoCities site since.

Re:In the long term...

[jonnythan]

"Final version"

LOL!!!!

Dude, this is GOOGLE we're talking about!!

Re:In the long term...

[eric_brissette]

Who wants to bet that the final version will have compulsory adsense or sponsored links down the right hand side?

The HTML/CSS code is appauling. They haven't even bothered to put the CSS in a seperate file, so if you create a multipage site, it's going to keep downloading the came old crap again and again.

Dude, I know! And there isn't any shell access or PHP/MySQL support! How am I supposed to run my TYPO3 content management system on this worthless service?

Seriously though, if the service gets popular, they'll probably do the external CSS files if only to save themselves bandwidth. The code itself seems to be well written.

Re:In the long term...

[oni]

It is totally appalling. You should write to them and demand a full refund!

Re:In the long term...

[nmg196]

I wasn't complaining.. just expecting. I'm perfectly happy to see the ads - I click through them quite a lot.

Hotlinking?

[Rob T Firefly]

Does hotlinking off your Googlepages site onto another work? If so, this could be a sneak attack at image hosts like Photobucket and Flickr.

Re:Hotlinking?

[kent_eh]

At the moment it does.
I hotlinked Calabro's image to Fark's scratchpad page (lifespan=2 hours) and it seems to work.

Until Google notices someone doing this, then they'll probably put a stop to it.

.Goo

[mccalli]

For once, it seems that Google is the one copying here. I'm speaking of .Mac, but not in its paid incarnation of .Mac but rather the freebie incarnation of iTools (think that was the name). I know other individual services have similar capabilities, but it's the tying of them all together that makes the service.

We have gPhoto and gWeb, Mail.app and Address Book. It's arguable whether Spotlight and Google Desktop share any direct inspiration (I don't think they do), but the upshot is the same there as well. Do they make gCal yet? Is gSync necessary even due to their web focus?

I await gMovie, gDVD, gTunes, gArageband with interest.

Cheers,
Ian

Great...

[Zog The Undeniable]

The long-awaited infinite monkeys and typewriters scenario is just around the corner. I await an outpouring of classic literature ;-)

Re:Great...

[samureiser]

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.

        Robert Wilensky, speech at a 1996 conference

Re:Great...

[youngerpants]

At first I laughed at your comment, then remembered a long time ago when Geocities had a "random page button" and cried a tear. I think a dozen monkeys have a better chance at producing literature than an infinite number of google home pages.

The timing is perfect

[LiquidNitrogen]

Just when M$ was going to release the same stuff but with more features ... http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=1 1b1081d-cfb0-4511-acb5-55db6b49f7de ... woohoo i love google

100MB only?

[Jesus IS the Devil]

I've been using Topcities.com for a while now and they offer 150MBs. Recently the bandwidth limit has been lifted too. It seems Google is just playing catch-up to the free hosting market. There's really nothing new to see here.

Five minute review

[Bogtha]

As with most Google-related things, they've focussed on the interface, but skipped QA when it comes to the code they put out. Five minutes with a validator would have been enough to ensure that they output valid code, but it seems they haven't bothered.

I'm also surprised that they are generating XHTML rather than HTML. There's no benefit in this case, and given that Ian Hickson, author of Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful, works for them, they should know better.

They use embedded <style> elements instead of simply linking to an external stylesheet - what a pointless waste of bandwidth. The default style reduces the font size by 15%, although they probably don't realise because it also uses Verdana. The visitors using other fonts are going to get very small text compared with the visitors using Verdana.

All in all, exactly what I'd expect from Google - decent interface, poor front-end code. They get a C.

google vs apple

[Anonymous Coward]

its more google vs apple (.mac in this case) than vs microsft every day....

ob Simpsons

[outcast36]

30 seconds? but I wanna be online now
Link to episode

Gotta love editable service agreement windows.

[cswiii]

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!

Re:Gotta love editable service agreement windows.

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried it, and I guess Google opes me a billion because pages.google.com appears to be slashdotted.

No safari either

[karvind]

I use Safari (Mac OS X) and it doesn't support that either. Duh ..

Re:No safari either

[log0n]

Safari doesn't support the rich text editing fields (or whatever it's called) as well as some good CSS layering stuff - both which gPages use. Try using gmail under Firefox and you'll see a world of difference.

Email Address

[SteveX]

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.

More conspiration theories

[zanderredux]

I think that Google seeded this news into Slashdot so that they could get a cheap stress test for their platform.

I've been trying to use it for the last 30 minutes and all I get is a nice Oops! page:

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.

At least, I know it is not my fault (or is it???)

I like it

[Madcowz]

I like it.

First thing I did was add links to all my sites to help them in their Google rankings. I wonder if Google adds weight to their own pages in the Page Rank system

/Mad

Google hosting usable without Page Creator?

[hcdejong]

100 Mb free hosting sounds tempting, but I don't need YA application to build my pages, I just want to create locally and then upload via ftp. TFA doesn't specify.

Re:Google hosting usable without Page Creator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just copy/paste the HTML. It is a bit more work, but you don't have to use their editor.

Re:Google hosting usable without Page Creator?

[hcdejong]

That's not 'a bit more work', that's bloody useless.
Uploading images via a web interface is a PITA, and can you even control in which folder your pages and images end up?
I want to be able to park my existing site (few dozen pages, maybe 100 photos) in one go, not one piece at a time.

Re:Google hosting usable without Page Creator?

[ender-]

Uploading images via a web interface is a PITA, and can you even control in which folder your pages and images end up?
I want to be able to park my existing site (few dozen pages, maybe 100 photos) in one go, not one piece at a time.

There are plenty of pay hosting services for reasonable rates [$2.99/month and up] that will allow you to do this.

Complaining that a free, beta hosting service doesn't allow you to do this is just selfish and stupid. If that is what you want/need in a hosting service then GooglePages isn't meant for you.

Re:Google hosting usable without Page Creator?

[hcdejong]

I wasn't complaining about the hosting service, merely pointing out that the 'solution' offered isn't useful.

It is because of IE 7 Beta 2

[Anonymous Coward]

the default page title was "username's Ho"! Now I hope thats because I was using IE7 Beta 2, or maybe it was my username length

"[9 char username]'s Ho" = 14 characters. You were using IE 7 Beta 2. 7 * 2 = 14. There's your problem. When IE 7 Beta 3 comes out, your title can be 21 characters.

TOS

[Chainsaw76]

The TOS for the site are fully editable (am I the only one that checks every time I see TOS in a text box?). That should make for some interesting agreements.

I wonder if they store the TOS version you agree to. Cause right now they owe me $99 for each page I write and store on their server.

-Jason

Lightweight source?

[Winterblink]

Doesn't anyone design pages to be light on bandwidth? Christ, I did a quick basic page and the resulting source code it sent to my browser contained well over 500 lines of stylesheet, browser tweaks, and other stuff, resulting in 12k of source in total. All for a title and a bit of hello worldy text.

Is it just me, or is the generated source possibly trying too hard?

Just a thought. I myself am a fairly minimalist person when it comes to web design, both from the design itself and the underlying source code.

Re:Lightweight source?

[Toreo asesino]

You'd be amazed how much shite you have to define (especially in CSS) to get a page to look uniform across most browsers - every one seems to have it's own interpretations of defaults if not specified - margins for instance, so it's all got to be tightly defined.

Normally the CSS would be ripped out into a seperate file to save bandwidth, but I'm guessing Google's didn't think it was worth the extra hassle.

Future product : Google Webhosting Package

[brs165]

Does anybody else see this as the first step into a total web presence package for people/companies? Imagine being able to have goolge host your domain and offer all the tools to mange your site. Page Creator for the website, PicasaWeb for an image gallery, GoogleGroups for a message board, etc.

Re:Future product : Google Webhosting Package

[d3bruts1d]

Well, Google is an ICANN accredited registrar, so it would be very easy for them to set up a system to allow you to purchase a domain, and get x free hosting space... and then for a fee offer more space. Hell, they could even throw in a AdWords credit for new domains (GoDaddy.com does it for their hosting packages).

Keep in mind, they also just started the GMail for your domain or whatever the program is called... this could allow them to provide free email via GMail to any domains hosted by Google.

Re:Future product : Google Webhosting Package

[1sockchuck]

A lot of small to medium-sized web hosting companies are worried about this (see Netcraft's story). But based on the Page Creator beta, they have nothing to worry about. It's inferior to dozens of web-based page builders already in use at hosting companies. Even Blogger is way easier and has better designs.

Re:Future product : Google Webhosting Package

[ELProphet]

Yes, and it came out... yesterday? At least this week. Sure, it's not good now, but how much better have News, Groups, and Mail gotten in their time? Give it 6 months, and it'll easily equal most pf the other free services.

Slashdotted

[CmdrPorno]

"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."

Great, we've Slashdotted Google. Anyone have a mirror?

Re:Slashdotted

[qwertphobia]

I did it. It happened when I clicked OK when it asked me to "Abort, Retry or Fail". Sorry, folks...

But seriously I saw this too, however I was able to get a up a page before it went down.

Re:Slashdotted

[MajinBlayze]

Mirror Here

(X)HTML standards?

[CarpetShark]

Did you happen to notice what version of HTML they're using? Presumably it generates nice XHTML with stylesheets accessibility and supports unicode? In other words, can I recommend it as a non-harmful tool for beginners?

Re:(X)HTML standards?

[generic-man]

No.

I recommend Nvu (formerly Mozilla Composer) as a decent free HTML editor if you're a stickler for standards.

Re:(X)HTML standards?

[CarpetShark]

OK, thanks for the information. But, Nvu was pretty horrible last time I looked. Neither Nvu or Dreamweaver seem very useful for modern layout with CSS etc. I'll have to stick to coding by hand for now.

Re: Internet Full

[ReidMaynard]

Back in '95 I was an provisioning engineer at InternetMCI. We worked a lot with the sales folks, who would coordinate for example the total instalation of a T1 line. A few fell for the email we sent out -- SUBJECT: Internet Cleanup. This weekend the internet will be closed to clean up all the dropped packets. EOM. -- One salesgirl told her client, who probably laughed at her, which is probably why she complained to our divison VP.

Re:Why not just change their name to "Google Beta"

[spge]

The beta suffix is a brilliant marketing idea. It achieves three things:
1. Technical users are made to feel that they are at the cutting edge, which they like.
2. Technical users understand that beta technology might break, so they are more forgiving when it does.
3. During the beta phase, Google has an army of free technical beta testers.
So Google beta projects can't lose.

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

[michalf]

lol, try to validate the page ;-)

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdre w.mclellan.googlepages.com%2Fhome

Failed validation, 16 errors. And these are serious errors that can tell you sth about googlepages engine.

michal

Opera is proprietary

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, it's non-free so I don't care. That Google have to support IE is one thing, a sad given for now. But it's a good thing that they give free - really free - products support before proprietary stuff. More freedom, less jailage.

Re:Why not just change their name to "Google Beta"

[bigtrike]

Agreed. None of google's other products will be usable for anything serious until they are relatively reliable and out of beta. Some of these services like Orkut have been up for several years and still have major outages. If you write to complain, they explain to you the products are still in beta. Until google finishes these beta products, they're just toys. I wish they would pull the plug if they're not going to finish them.

Google's image will be tarnished eventually if they keep increasing the number of half broken beta sites. Their logo will become a symbol of unreliability.

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

[generic-man]

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

Ripoff of Backpack?

[zach_smith]

I can't get through to the "Google Page Creator" to really check this out, but it sounds like a ripoff of the incredibly useful Backpack by 37signals which (surprise) uses Ajax as well (through Ruby on Rails).

Re:Ripoff of Backpack?

[heinousjay]

This does have one advantage over anything from 37signals - it hasn't been sprayed with a DHH egogasm.

Re:Ripoff of Backpack?

[generic-man]

I've used and enjoyed Backpack for months and have never heard of DHH or "egogasms." Would you care to explain without using words only the blogosphere* would collectively understand?

* "Blogosphere" is one of those words

Another market chunk

[krod77]

Looks like Google is trying to get into the web hosting business. In the future, do you think that they will display any adverts in a attempt to make a profit?

That isn't a strategy

[TubeSteak]

google does not nessesarily create these apps with a plan in mind

Relying on luck to weed out the good ideas from the bad is not a strategy.

It is sometimes called the "shotgun approach."

Most businesses would not waste money on implementing an idea with no clear plan on how to monetize it.

Google has an interesting approach, but it is not what anyone would call a strategy

Re:That isn't a strategy

[Dun Malg]

Relying on luck to weed out the good ideas from the bad is not a strategy. It is sometimes called the "shotgun approach." Google has an interesting approach, but it is not what anyone would call a strategy

It's not their entire strategy, it's only part of their strategy. You make it sound like everyone at google is just randomly trying stuff to see if it sticks. In reality, most of their time is is spent on planned development. They are encouraged, however, to spend some fraction of their work time on personal projects. In other words, they figuratively spend most of their day taking aimed shots at specific targets, but once or twice a day they shoot in a random direction with a shotgun.

Re:That isn't a strategy

[ejp1082]

Also known as the "Dick Cheney" approach.

Ads!?!

[zubinjdalal]

Their T&Cs state: "Some Google services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions on the service." (Duh!)

This means that Google could insert ads on content created using Page Creator and hosted at *.googlepages.com.

Nice!

Re:Ads!?!

[krod77]

I think they will allow publishers to intergrate adsense adverts, its a win win for the publisher and google. The publisher makes money, and google makes money.

Re:Ads!?!

[zubinjdalal]

... or they could require (read force) the ads and then only they make money. Possibly even track the clicks and move your "googlepage" (is that the new "homepage"?) up in the Google search rankings.

Re:Ads!?!

[krod77]

They would never interfere with the Google ranking system.

5. Will Google give preferential treatment to web pages created with Google Page Creator in Google search results?

No, we won't. Web pages created using Google Page Creator will never receive any preferential treatment of any kind in Google search results

Mod parent "funny"

[blueZ3]

Frontpage may be ugly, but it is more than just a wysiwyg editor---that's an understatement for the ages.

Frontpage is not only NOT wysiwyg, it's hilariously non-wysiwyg. Anyone remember bulleted lists that showed

in the "code" view, but were actually tables containing images for bullets? Or ever run the Dreamweaver "Clean up Word HTML" tool on a fairly simple page and have it clear over 600 empty tags and clean up 300 improperly nested tags.

One of my first jobs as a writer involved editing technical info pages that someone had created in FP... When I looked at the page sizes versus file sizes, I was a little surprised (it didn't seem like it should require 50kb of ASCII text for that little on-screen content. When first opened a page in a text editor I was boggled. I'd never seen such a mess. I actually bought Dreamweaver specifically to clean up the pages (there were quite a few and manual cleanup didn' appeal)

The (well-deserved) death of Frontpage is looooong overdue.

Re:Mod parent "funny"

[Anonymous Coward]

When was this? htmltidy is pretty old...

You aren't the target audience

[JaseOne]

I just created my homepage 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.

You obviously know what you are doing so you were trying to do things that Google Pages just isn't intended to do, it isn't a Drewamweaver replacement or even a competitor to Nvu it is just a simple and quick way to build basic pages that look quite nice using the including templates.

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

[michalf]

but how the hell can anyone put a inside and claim it is xhtml strict??? it is just beond my imagination... my students know better how to build good pages... ;-)

michal

It crashes my Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried it, but my Firefox keeps crashing. Very annoying.

100mb eh?!

[wwmedia]

100mb eh?!

looks like google is going to become a dump for the warez comunity!

1. open an account
2. upload 100mb part of archive
3. repeat untill latest hollywood movies is uploaded onto several accounts
4. spread the links for the uploaded files far and wide!

Even though the need is not a big concern

[nomad63]

Well, most hand picked google mail beta participants being the geeks at heart to some degree, I do not think this service will be of much need but having a 100 MB web page at your disposal for quick scratches, is really nice from a free service.

Aw.. no good for what I wanted to use it for.

[skryche]

I was waiting for this service to go live so I could recommend it to actors who want to put their resumés online. Unfortunately,

A. No tables (!)
B. It won't FTP to other domains.

However...

[Rocketship Underpant]

Although they haven't built it to support Safari for editing, the styles in a completed page include text shadows, which look really nice but are only supported in Safari so far. So Google engineers are viewing their pages in Safari, even if they haven't made the application itself work.

Retrofitting == bad

[CarpetShark]

Actually, to do it properly, they'd probably have to design it properly. Taking code that generates non-standard 1997 html and changing it to create modern, fully standards-compliant, accessible markup is a tall order.

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

[generic-man]

Your students must work at MSN, the only valid-XHTML-Strict search engine, then :)

Easy solution

[lildogie]

Set up a different email account for the web page, and don't read the mail there.

Finally, a use for one percent of your invitations.

At least they have a sense of humor

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Opera 8.52, you get this:

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.

Finally!

[Zantetsuken]

I can dump my geocities account that I use for forum sig img hosting...

Ah, so *that's* what "AJAX" stands for...

[feijai]

"Doesn't Work with Safari".

I had forgotten.

Re:Ah, so *that's* what "AJAX" stands for...

[Heembo]

Uh sorry - I've written many complex Ajax components that work on Safari, Firefox XP/Mac, IE XP. It's not even that hard you just need to test your code well. GOOGLE? WAKE UP!

Web Standards Compliance?

[CaptainPinko]

The produced pages claim to be XHTML 1.0 Strict... but it isn't! The mistakes are pretty bad such as not closing <img> and <br> tags. Also there is so ugly HTML like empty <p></p> tags that you'd think would be easily removed. Also, I don't see any support for the semantic web such as annotating your page with rel="". The battle for web-standards will be won on the web-designer front: when the tools produce correct pages that'll give impetus for everyone to produce clean pages and for all other tools to get up to snuff. Frankly, I think the best way is to create an editor that only lets you create pages that pass from valid state to valid state by producing all the necessary tags every time you add an element so that you can't forget. It can be invasive but it can also be done well.

Please mod this up so that maybe somebody at Google will notice.

PS- What if /. required all post to be valid HTML (or plain-text) before posting them? That would definitely increase awareness and encourage good HTML habits! (After that, perhaps passing a spellchecker! :P)

Re:Web Standards Compliance?

[anotherone]

hahahaha yeah I'm sure that Google reads slashdot at +5 for user feedback data.

Re:Web Standards Compliance?

[CaptainPinko]

You'd be surprised. After all, on OSNews Sun engineers appear regularily especially in Sun-related threads. I don't doubt that probably someone from Google has already raed my post. The only issue is with an organisation that big will it get seen by the relevant people? A +5 would help draw their attention. It's not like anyone cares about their karma anymore so why I else would I be doing it?

No Adsense So Far

[cmpalmer]

I tried to embed an Adsense block into the page and it doesn't show. Probably because scripting is not allowed, but I haven't experimented further. Will they make scripting exceptions for Adsense? Will they not allow personal Adsense accounts on the page? They do on Blogger.

I put a Google Search box (part of the Adsense program) in and it seems to work, but I can't test it myself without violating my terms of service with Adsense :-(

Slashdotted

[lostrckstr]

Apparently even Google can get slashdotted... while I got in just fine on one of my accounts, 10 minutes later (on another one) it tells me: "Thank you for your interest in Google Page Creator! Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience." Now the real question- what does temporarily mean?

Cool

[Mad Ogre]

Kinda like when I first started blogging back when HOTBOT was hosting...

Re:Why not just change their name to "Google Beta"

[elrous0]

So Google beta projects can't lose.

Would *you* feel confident investing in a construction compnay that never finished a construction project? Eventually their reputation will suffer and advertisers and investors will start to notice all the cracks in the facade.

-Eric

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

[garaged]

I dare to probe that your students pages are more cross plataform thatn googles code. I even dare you to probe your own pages !

Googles about 2 days away from a ptatent lawsuit..

[Xanius]

All I have to say is they shou'd have looked at patents before upping this...as reported last night on techdirt and today on /. a copy has patented exactly this. http://techdirt.com/articles/20060222/1644208_F.sh tml
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/23/01 59230&from=rss

Re:Why not just change their name to "Google Beta"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is symptomatic of the "enthusiast" working style, whereby people get incredibly enthusiastic about new projects and ideas and are very quick to get the prototype (or beta in this case) ready, but find it very difficult to actually complete the project afterwards.

Of course, the layman term for this is "lazy".

BTW - I hate finishing projects. That's why I work in R&D - prototypes all the way..!

Google Slashdotted?

[BodhiCat]

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.

Re:Google Slashdotted?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had it lock up, after I got in. Of course, I assumed it was because I changed the terms of service agreement, by removing and adding a few things. Then I realized I could just delete the whole thing, so I did. Then I selected the box that said I agreed with the terms of service box, which was nothing, then hit the submit button. I was expecting it to kick me back to that page to agree to their version of the agreement, but that did not happen. I played with the page creater for a few minutes, until it locked up. -lmsjr

Re:Googles about 2 days away from a patent lawsuit

[Xanius]

UGH, wth did my keyboard do.... All I have to say is they should have looked at patents before upping this...as reported last night on techdirt and today on /. a company has patented exactly this. Along with a few other interesting things if you read the entire patent.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060222/1644208_F.sh tml http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/23/01 59230&from=rss

BeVeryEvil.googlepages.com

[greggish]

I just threw this up real fast...

http://beveryevil.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. :)

Re:BeVeryEvil.googlepages.com

[Anonymous Coward]

eh, that page renders very badly on Opera ...

Re:BeVeryEvil.googlepages.com

[greggish]

So many sites get screwed up in Opera that I've switched over to Firefox. FF is a little slower and buggier but at least most of the sites look right.

Re:BeVeryEvil.googlepages.com

[digitallife]

I just tried it in Firefox and Opera 8.52 and it looks exactly the same.

I hear all this complaining lately that Opera doesn't render pages properly and is so much trouble, but I've got to be honest, despite using it all day as my main browser, I hardly ever notice any problems. Most of the problems I do encounter are weird things like no email address drop-down box in gmail when sending an email. Don't get me wrong, I think Opera is not built for by web developers very often, but it doesn't seem like a very big problem.

Email in your Site Name

[thehubbell]

How long will it be until spam bots are programed to find googlepages websites and harvest the user names?

Re:Email in your Site Name

[Petrushka]

... which is why I've already created a new Google account whose e-mail address I'm never ever going to check. :-)

Re:The Shotgun Effect - your statistics !

[earthstar]

dude

consider posting your google page statistics here.. ( if they provide that ) Lets see what slashdot has done to you !

slashdotters with gmail account

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one got in fine. Look for Anonymous Coward at Google pages!

Licensing fee?

[zubinjdalal]

Did Google pay the Balthaser licensing fee?

Screenshots?

[panic911]

Could someone please post some screenshots? I'm very curious to see how this looks, and unfortuntely google disabled new signups. I've been playing with the Microsoft Office Live beta and am wondering how similar this is. Can you use custom domain names with it? That'll be really funny if this service has the same features as Office Live.. cuz it's free.. and google.

Re:Screenshots?

[randomErr]

PC World has a cople of screen shoots. Your domain will be a your Gmail address: http://gmailusername.googlepages.com/

Don't expect this to be like Office live for a good long time.

No thanks, I'll wait for the Brin Creator

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone had to say it (and probably already has a few times).

I would replace pet ferrets...

[serginho]

...with pr0n.

(And why did it take Google suche a long time to profit from the mother of all online businessess?)

Digg Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

We beat u guys by like 13 hours....digg effect...not /. effect

Re:Digg Effect

[Monkey]

The grammar, style and even the subject of your post typifies what I see in the comments on digg.

Whenever I start thinking the quality of posts on /. has completely gone downhill, I just go read digg for five minutes and come back to /. with a renewed outlook.

That's because...

[TyrelHaveman]

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:That's because...

[Anonymous Coward]

MSN's search page and results pages are all valid XHTML. If Microsoft doesn't make you cringe, I recommend MSN.

Re:That's because...

[babbling]

Yeah, because Google can't afford that 300 gigs of bandwidth, eh?

Paying for 300 gigs of bandwidth would be a very insignificant cost to Google.

Re:That's because...

[killjoe]

Then I suggest that google work to embed a lisp interpreter in firefox. That way we can ditch HTML altogether and just go with lisp. Lets face it, there was no need to invent XML or HTML both are poorly thought out s-expressions.

Re:That's because...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but it's still not really worth it to please a bunch of geeks that cry for standard compliance.

They aren't accepting any new Page Creator account

[kenwood720]

From Google: Thank you for your interest in Google Page Creator! Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience.

LInk

[ZePedro]

a good page which talks about that notice http://life.firelace.com/2006/02/google_rumors_aja x_web_page_cr.html

Actually

[elfguy]

I don't think that's what they do. Their business is ads, all their money comes from them, so they do have a strategy, and it's to find as many ways as possible to get their ads out there. It makes perfect sense to give people free blog accounts, free mail, and now free web pages, so that they can probe what people write about and get ads to them.

Google got Slashdotted?

[jamiguet]

Managed to login earlier.... pointed it out to a colleague... and got a page saying to put your e-mail in because they have blocked registration momentarily...

Is slashdot mightier than Google?

Re:Google got Slashdotted?

[dwight0]

it was digged. digg.com

Do no evil?

[erice]

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.

Developers should always think of the future becuase the end user can only be relied on to think of the present. Breaking standards just because the end users don't notice a problem right now is evil and doesn't Google have a policy about that?

Blog software

[metamatic]

"Blog" software is often more than just that. For example, typo (a Rails application) also has pages without comments that you can edit and publish. Blosxom is almost better as a general CMS than it is for 'blogging'.

But Google should!

[babbling]

Google have a vested interest in the web being as standards-compliant as possible. If every website suddenly became a combination of Macromedia Flash and GIF logos without any "alt" attributes, Google would suddenly become rather useless, and it would be a difficult task to make it useful again. They'd have to start scanning through any text that is in the data portion of Flash files, or something.

Google should be encouraging people to be as standards compliant as possible.

Microsoft.com validates, but Google should recognise that Microsoft are capable of doing some good things.

Re:But Google should!

[generic-man]

I can make a "standards compliant" page out of IMG tags that the W3C validator would absolutely love. What you mean is "Google has a vested interest in keeping lots of text flowing through the Internet," and that's certainly true. They've got an e-mail service, an IM service, a not-necessarily-usenet groups service, a blogging service, and many other services that ensure that Google has plenty of text to index and to seed their contextual ad generator.

Incidentally, Google does index text it finds in Flash files and has for nearly two years.

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

[babbling]

Maybe they should. Some sites have been sued because their websites were not easily accessible (didn't validate) for seeing-impaired users.

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

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Interestingly enough, MSN search validates as XHTML 1.0 strict, MSN.com has only 2 errors (also XHTML 1.0 strict), and microsoft.com validates as HTML 4 transitional.

Bets on next step == spreadsheet?

[brunes69]

This about it - what do most people use a computer for? Surfing the web, listening to music, watching videos, reading email, writing documents.

Google is already the portal to most people's web browsing. They already have email, instant messaging. They already have a multimedia player and indexing for it. They already have an instant messanger.

What is the only often used piece of software left? The office suite. If Google can make a successful office suite online with Ajax, then they will succeed where Netscape failed, in untying the user from the OS. When you think about it, Google Pages is nothing mroe than a rudimentry word processor, where your documents are save dpublically. Add in the ability to save private documents, and you instantly have a low-budget replacement for Word.

This is where I think Google is going, and why MS should be scared. This is why they are investing in Firefox so hevaily, because if all your activities run online off of the google.com cluster, then what need do you need for Windows? Or any OS for that matter? Why not just boot into a browser-based shell?

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

[generic-man]

From: Google
To: babbling
Subj: RE: Accessibility

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

(tons of HTML headers)

lol no. blind people no how to use a search box.

(really fancy signature with graphics)

(giant faux-legal disclaimer)

--- Original Message ---

Maybe they should. Some sites have been sued because their websites were not easily accessible (didn't validate) for seeing-impaired users.

(repeat of above message in plain text with very mangled formatting)

EPIC babysteps

[Antisquark]

Sounds one step closer to EPIC http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/

Let me get this straight...

[ArthurDent]

They'll give me 2.6 GB for my mail, but only 100 MB for my web page? What about letting me use some of that mail storage for my web page?

The mind boggles...

Re:Let me get this straight...

[OOGG_THE_CAVEMAN]

It's natural to limit web storage to significantly less than e-mail storage.

- Only one user at a time is typically reading your e-mail. A web page can get hits from any number of people at once.
- Most e-mail is plain text or simple HTML. Web pages routinely include large files like photos, and if enough space is available, videos.
- Large attachments to e-mail get downloaded just once, typically. Popular photos or videos could be downloaded hundreds or thousands of times.

Unless, of course, you leave your e-mail inbox with video attachments open for any of the billion or so web users in the world to click on anytime they feel like it.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[ArthurDent]

If the problem is bandwidth then that can be solved by a bandwidth cap not a storage limit. A storage limit is the wrong way to solve the problem, as a matter of fact.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[drsquare]

They don't have the capacity for that. Websites fill all available space, whereas most gigabyte sized email accounts have barely a few hundred kilobytes in.

This plus domains plus email addresses?

[beemishboy]

Google is currently testing giving email addresses and space to universities and other entities.
I wonder if that could be joined with this pages project only in a more business-like form complete with a shopping cart library and a payment mechanism.
Then they would just need a nice way to register domain names and they would be a new Yahoo Shopping only easier and better.

Re:Why not just change their name to "Google Beta"

[generic-man]

I predict that Google will release a repository system for storing all your half-finished ideas that sounded great but were never really made scalable or complete. They can call it Sourceforge.

Adult Content

[jouvart]

If you check the site settings for the Google Pages management page, there's a checkbox for "Adult Content". What could this do for porn distribution? I, for one, welcome our new Google porn overlords.

Oops! demand exceeded capacity!

[lbalbalba]

Looks like the demand for this has already exceeded the capacity that google had allocated for this service. When I tried it, I got the following page http://pages.google.com/registrationoff : " ... Oops! Thank you for your interest in Google Page Creator! Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience. ..."

What they should do....

[physman_wiu]

So they give you over 2500mb on your gmail account, then limit you to 100mb for a webpage?? Even blogger doesn't have a limit, only limited functionality.

They should set the the storage space as part of your gmail account. Add a public folder that you could upload pictures or just about any html link, flash file, etc.. and then use that space for your webpage. The only thing about that would be privacy concers (like they don't have enough, but I'm sure they could handle it, not that they would actually have to have the files put into your email box, just take away from your storage limit on what you upload.

Good Idea I think.

Google Slashdoted?

[lynxpardinus]

---------------------
Thank you for your interest in Google Page Creator! Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience.
----------------------

And it took what, less than 4 hours?

"Page" Creator?

[The trees]

Google is trying to make an army of Larry Page clones! They are turning evil!

well this is special how?

[geekmonk]

This has been available on the web since 1997.. Alice.net was providing this service all the way back then. Actually it started all the way back to August 1996. Quantun Technologies started offering free site all the way back then.. IBM started a year later and has the patent on this technology.. For the moment...

Good move, Google...

[blackcanoflysol]

This is a good move for Google. They are increasing their services, and will catch up with Yahoo someday... We now have g-mail, google talk, and now this must be like Geocities or something. It can't be too bad, or everyone is currently intrigued because I got an 'Oops' error because they are now limiting the number of accounts for users. I can't wait to use it for myself, though.

but does it run...

[Suchetha]

... on linux?

Re:but does it run...

[HeroreV]

Maybe not "run", but certainly quite a brisk jog.

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

[HeroreV]

Wow. I knew about MSN but I didn't know that the homepage of Microsoft.com had also been redone. I now hate Microsoft just a little less.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

When I checked the page, there was 73 errors.

Sounds like you work for google ;)

Re:Why not just change their name to "Google Beta"

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's engineers can do whatever they want one day a week. This is probably something someone has spent a couple of days on, and Google just throws it out there.

It generates a lot of free PR.

A few easy steps to success:

1. Give 20% "play" time to employees
2. Throw whatever the employees make out to the public. It's something you have paid for anyway, so they have nothing to lose
3. Call it "beta" so thatfanboys ignores the smell (and attack others who dare to complain about a beta product.
4. PC World, Slashdot and other media writes articles about it, with a lot of speculation about how it will kill Dreamweaver once it's out of beta
5. Get a lot of traffic
6. Preserve the brand, and make people think you are superior
7. Profit

How many of the Google Beta-software, has come out of Beta? Are there any besides Google News?

Agreed to a certain extent

[Programmer_In_Traini]

Hum... I agree with what you say...to a certain extent. Laws of evolution and laws of evolution...of a business dont share all the same properties.

I am certainly not a huge businessman myself but I know a thing or two about it. While you, me, the guy next door won't have a real plan or real goal to attain, a company president will have a goal and a plan. This is why he started a company in the first place. A company will not randomly accept to publish/support/finance anything just to see where it goes. it does so because it believe it can get benefits out of it, not always money, just benefits or some sort.

I know that in google's case, it started as a basement project, just some funny stuff he was doing. but, its turns out google became the biggest and most efficient search engine in the world (or so i believe). It has spread its wings over VoIP, maps, news ... anything that relates to information. I have no numbers but the company's worth millions if not billions of dollars. At that scale, you certainly dont do things randomly, you aim at something very particular.

a small starting company might act randomly and try to see what will turn out to be the most profitable, but a big company will know exactly where it wants to go.

The right way to limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you have a bandwidth cap, then you could end up with your pages offline for half of the month. I'd rather have a smaller limit and better reliability.
The relative merits of the strageties are debatable.