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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."
Just to make up a random statistic I bet, ooh, 50% of all dead links on the internet are to Angelfire and Geocities sites (the other half seem to be to ~someoneshome/some.edu )
Some time ago I got to not even clicking to visit a site if I saw it was Angelfire or Geocities. Is it because all those people who built sites lost interest, moved onto other things? Certainly a percentage did use these free hosts as their first forray into the world of the web, but I bet you that's not the reason. I'm betting the largest number of those sites were taken down, either because they infringed on some trivial copyright, or because they broke the ever more ridiculous TOS of the hosts.
My point is this, publicly hosting user content is a NIGHTMARE. How are Google going to handle the slew of bad publicity that befalls them when they take down little Johnys "Bus route enthusiats website" because it contains "copyrighted" material? Are Google suddenly going to become porn police deciding where the line falls for those revealing prom pics that the teenage girls put up?
Google are heading into a minefield. I'm making no judgement one way or the other but expect to see a LOT of "Google are evil because.... / No they're not because...." stories very soon.