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

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?

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.

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

[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

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).

.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

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

[generic-man]

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

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).