Google Introduces Page Creator

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Google Introduces Page Creator

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday February 23, 2006 @01:45AM from the net-just-got-a-lot-more-crowded dept.

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.

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file hosting limit by Seoulstriker · 2006-02-23 01:47 · Score: 3, Informative

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

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1. Re:file hosting limit by garcia · 2006-02-23 02:09 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  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.
2. Re:file hosting limit by Ossifer · 2006-02-23 03:06 · Score: 2, Interesting
  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...
How good is it by HBergeron · 2006-02-23 01:47 · Score: 3, Interesting

Does this replace the soon to be discontinued Frontpage for the unsophisticated user? Is MS retreating from the field just as Google takes it?

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1. Re:How good is it by NickFitz · 2006-02-23 01:55 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
  
  --
  Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
2. Re:How good is it by hcdejong · 2006-02-23 02:02 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
3. Re:How good is it by kfg · 2006-02-23 02:15 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  . . .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
4. Re:How good is it by diegocgteleline.es · 2006-02-23 03:08 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  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.
5. Re:How good is it by poot_rootbeer · 2006-02-23 04:41 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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?
Oops! by trentblase · 2006-02-23 01:47 · Score: 2, Informative

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.
1. Re:Oops! by psycln · 2006-02-23 02:11 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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
2. Re:Oops! by Daytona955i · 2006-02-23 02:52 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  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.
Just what we need by RagingFuryBlack · 2006-02-23 01:48 · Score: 2, Funny

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.

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For a free service its not bad by majortom1981 · 2006-02-23 01:48 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
1. Re:For a free service its not bad by bedroll · 2006-02-23 03:06 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  "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.
Browser Support by Nikoth · 2006-02-23 01:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

Shame that it can't be used in Opera. I'll be loading up Firefox now to have a go of it though.
1. Re:Browser Support by bartyboy · 2006-02-23 02:11 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Just go to www.ie7.com to upgrade browsers.
Patent violation! by Anonymous Coward · 2006-02-23 01:49 · Score: 2, Funny

Doesn't this violate US Patent number 7,000,180?
Already plenty of tools out there by CRCulver · 2006-02-23 01:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

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 by eldavojohn · 2006-02-23 01:52 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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My work here is dung.
1. Re:The Shotgun Effect by resprung · 2006-02-23 02:12 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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
  
  --
  Now is the winter of our disco tent
2. Re:The Shotgun Effect by skubeedooo · 2006-02-23 02:22 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  What did Microsoft do extremely well?
  Excel
  Visual Studio
3. Re:The Shotgun Effect by Guanix · 2006-02-23 02:23 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  Excel and VBA.
4. Re:The Shotgun Effect by log0n · 2006-02-23 03:21 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  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.
No Safari support yet by Chris_Jefferson · 2006-02-23 01:54 · Score: 4, Informative

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

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great for targeted spamming by dutchwhizzman · 2006-02-23 01:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Why Google is still cool by theskipper · 2006-02-23 01:57 · Score: 5, Funny

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?
Odd by broothal · 2006-02-23 01:57 · Score: 2, Funny

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...
Why not just change their name to "Google Beta"? by elrous0 · 2006-02-23 01:59 · Score: 3, Insightful

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

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No opera either by SmallFurryCreature · 2006-02-23 02:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Overall idea is to make more money by vivekg · 2006-02-23 02:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

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).

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Re:Page Locked. by Professor_UNIX · 2006-02-23 02:02 · Score: 2, Funny

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.
A sterling job on the XSS defenses though by buro9 · 2006-02-23 02:02 · Score: 5, Informative
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.
1. Re:A sterling job on the XSS defenses though by ricky.zhou · 2006-02-23 03:44 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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 by Danathar · 2006-02-23 02:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Misunderstanding of google strategy by MrCam · 2006-02-23 03:13 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
Gotta love editable service agreement windows. by cswiii · 2006-02-23 02:19 · Score: 5, Funny

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!
Email Address by SteveX · 2006-02-23 02:21 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Re:How good is it - it does NOT VALIDATE ;-) by michalf · 2006-02-23 02:59 · Score: 2, Informative

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
Re:Why not just change their name to "Google Beta" by bigtrike · 2006-02-23 03:07 · Score: 2, Insightful

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 ;-) by generic-man · 2006-02-23 03:07 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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That isn't a strategy by TubeSteak · 2006-02-23 03:12 · Score: 2, Insightful

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

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[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
1. Re:That isn't a strategy by Dun+Malg · 2006-02-23 03:26 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  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.
  
  --
  If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Re:Compared to wiki engines... by DeathBunny · 2006-02-23 03:21 · Score: 2, Informative

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.
100mb eh?! by wwmedia · 2006-02-23 03:21 · Score: 2, Funny

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!
Re:How good is it - it does NOT VALIDATE ;-) by generic-man · 2006-02-23 03:30 · Score: 2, Interesting

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

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Easy solution by lildogie · 2006-02-23 03:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.
BeVeryEvil.googlepages.com by greggish · 2006-02-23 04:09 · Score: 4, Funny

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. :)
Email in your Site Name by thehubbell · 2006-02-23 04:10 · Score: 2, Insightful

How long will it be until spam bots are programed to find googlepages websites and harvest the user names?
That's because... by TyrelHaveman · 2006-02-23 05:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.