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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.
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.
- The use of AJAX is well done. Pages save by themselves, you can drag and align images, and there's a nifty file upload utility.
- There's simple versioning, allowing work on pages before publishing.
- The HTML editor is super-easy. They do let you play with the raw HTML, which might cause problems down the road.
In general, I think it'll be a nice tool for people wanting a small little web site with a handful of pages. It doesn't do other things very well, such as maintaining navigation between pages or doing any sort of interactive pages. Still, Google tries hard to capture the 80% useage and I think they've done so with this little application.USERNAME@gmail.com can be obtained from USERNAME.googlepages.com and a list of the later can be pulled by using Google to search for site: googlepages.com
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
GooglePages offers a very basic set of editing tools and a bunch of pre-defined page templates. It's pretty similar in usability to the GeoCities tools I used a while back, but the big difference is that it's all in-browser editing. With GeoCities I had to download an editor app and fire it up if I wanted to work on my pages, whereas with GooglePages you can immediately start entering content which makes it much more user friendly. I almost gave up of GeoCities several times due to the initial configuration process.
I wish Google had better integration, or even just basic links between it's services. Logged into Gmail and want to edit your GooglePages? Tough, you might as well open a seperate browser tab and navigate there from scratch. Likewise if you have a personalised Google home page - you can load a widget into it linking to your gmail, but again if you're in Gmail there's no easy way to go to your Google homepage reliably.
I know these are 'beta' services and they're beign incrementaly improved - the chat client in Gmail is nice - but Gmail has been in beta for a year or so now and how difficult would it be to just put simple links in place?
Simon
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.
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.
yes, but no matter how much TFA says it was released on Wednesday, it's been around since the last article. I built a site, other people built sites. This is nothing new, just TFA being slow.
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.