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Google Pages Launches
An anonymous reader writes "Google released the first public beta of its Google Pages service Wednesday, allowing users who signed up for the service in January and February to begin creating personal websites using an easy-to-use, browser-based tool. The service gives each user 100 MB of free storage space on Google's servers. To use the Google Page Creator tool, users must have an existing Google account. However, only those who signed up early (in January and February) to use Google Pages have access to the current beta. No new signups are being accepted at this time, Google said. The company is expected to open Page Creator to more widespread use over the next few weeks."
Funny, I could've sworn GeoCities and Angelfire had something like this many many years ago. Complete with page building tools and wizards...
The only true advantage I see to this is that Google gives you a LOT more disk space for free, wheras you have to pay for more with G&A... but perhaps that's why we're seeing "Sorry, we are unable to offer new accounts today. We appreciate your interest and invite you to add your Gmail address to our wait list. We'll let you know when we've enabled your account."
I'm not trying to advertise for G&A, I just don't see how this is something to jump up and down about. Search engine, Email, webpages, online stores/auctions... they're just becoming the next Yahoo.
--
"Man Bites Dog
Then Bites Self"
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
It'll be interesting to watch how cautiously they approach this launch. After the Google Analytics launch debarcle I'll watch intensely at how much they've learned.
That someone at Google is browsing Yahoo! just a little too much?
Does anybody actually still just edit static web pages? And does anybody still edit navigational structures by hand instead of using a CMS for maintaining the navigational elements?
It seems to me that a home page site should, at a minimum, support static pages, blogs, a gallery, calendar, comments, and a file archive under a common navigational structure.
So, this seems like a neat tour-de-force in AJAX, but I think it's missing where the world has been moving over the last few years.
I run two of my own servers but I signed up because I was looking for a simple web hosting service to recommend to a few non-technical friends. The editing features are simple enough to use. I ended up putting a boring little rant on Spirituality and Responsibility on my free googlepages account - nothing that I would put on my professional web sites, and material that is probably too boring even for my blog :-)
From my experience, many ISP's embed your username somewhere in the URL to their free webspace offerings. Is this any different?
According to this page, spammers hadn't caught on to this the last time the page was updated.
But then again, Gmail's spam handling is excellent, so I personally wouldn't worry about it.
I receive about 300-400 spam emails per month, and typically Gmail flags them correctly. I almost never get false positives, and only occasionally, it misses a few, but overall, spam really hasn't been an issue for me with Gmail.
So Will PAgeCreator increase spam? Probably, but it really shouldn't impact Gmail users that much.
-Jim
http://gmailtips.com/
http://googlepagestips.com/
http://pagecreatortips.com/
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Unfortunately it's not a dupe when it's reporting new news. Just as Microsoft releasing the beta for Windows Vista isn't a dupe of Microsoft announcing that there will be a Windows Vista, this is not a dupe of that article. Didn't the "google released this Wednesday" clue you in that the article might actually be reporting something different than the article from more than a month ago, even if they are on the same software?
I tried it yesterday, and didn't like it.
Oh, it's a groovy implementation of AJAX, but I found it was very awkward to use. It was restrictive enough to be frustrating, yet flexible enough to be confusing. I think Google was shooting for that perfect balance between usability and features, and missed.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
You are supporting my point: the "home page" has been replaced by other services, which incidentally also generate an externally visible page. The people who still attempt to create a classical home page generate something that's ugly and obsolete.
Maybe they just don't bother about SpamGourmet addresses? ;-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
That's because the Safari team have spent too much time on CSS 2 (just so they can release smug acid test press releases) rather then getting the browser to work in real world situations.
Apple engineers, if you're reading this, please start working on your DOM model & Javascript. As things stand your rather crappy browser is hard to support.
The difference is that storage is cheap, but bandwidth is expensive.
If you store 1 GB of mail, you will probably only access each individual message 5 times, ever. If you put up 1 GB of data on the web, you want it to be downloaded by as many people as possible, every day for the live of the page.
Cinnamon
If people depend on Google for their searches, e-mail, instant messaging, maps, satellite views, advertising and news (beta).. they might as well use it for their web presence.
Anyone who has ever worked for the KGB must be so jealous at the rate of voluntary user data centralisation.