Although there has been no official announcement yet Google have released the long awaited and long-rumored Google Pages (which has nothing to do with cloning Larry Page). Pages allows users to create a webpage using an AJAX interface that removes a lot of the ‘pain’ associated with creating pages with HTML and other desktop design applications. If you have some time on your hands and would like to try this out, then head over to http://pages.google.com to signup. If you have an existing Google account (they snuck that on us, didn’t they) then getting a pages account is very simple.
Once you are in the application you are presented with a WYSIWYG interface displaying your page and some editing controls. The interface in terms of what they have done with client-side Javascript is impressive, and what Google has done in terms of putting up simple pages is cool but overall it is an underwhelming gimmick that may have some potential if they focus. Google Pages allows you to upload files, create many pages that you can link up, and select from a smorgasbord of templates. The website which you can then push out to publish can then be found at username.googlepages.com.
I went through and created my own page which can be found at http://cubrilovic.googlepages.com. The retro look demonstrates the problem with giving your content creators too much control and not wrapping them up more tightly into a nice template. The way it usually works with real website design is that the design wraps the content creator up completely simply so they don’t mess things up – only because we aren’t all creative types. Google Pages does let you upload any file though, and gives you 100MB of space, which some may find more useful for sharing files or distributing SNL video’s.
For instance, this is not going to be a threat to the younger crowd who are all creating pages on MySpace, nor to the audience of millions of bloggers who already have their online presence, nor to the players in the CMS space who offer a whole lot more in functionality and power. I am not sure who this is targeted at as the small business owners and non technical folk sure aren’t looking at Google for a website solution and considering there is no domain mapping at the moment being a business and handing out a googlepages.com domain is just, well, embarrassing.
I don’t think we will see a huge swell in the number of serious websites hosted on pages, but this may be a step towards a CMS suite for small businesses that would include some form of super-blogger, along with free domain registration or some of the other features that Office Live will be offering. I just can’t help thinking that this product feels unfocused and underdeveloped - especially coming from a company such as Google.
Update: A few minutes after I posted this Google took the site down. I hope I didn’t lose all my work.
Website is dead
Yep - updated the post at the footer
Think google hurried itself,catching ppl before office did.Maybe thats why pages isnt really that good,but its good enough for me..
The site appears to be back now. I gave it a quick spin and was pretty impressed but I can’t shake the feeling that this is the return of Geocities.
this is pretty uncool
What really surprised me was the lack of integration with Blogger. I mean, wouldn’t that make sense?
Alasdair this is Google, you can’t talk about making sense
it’s not for any of your proposed audiences directly. it’s for supplemental, well-defined, rich content hosting. think of it as a cross between blogger and writely.
good for publishing relatively stand alone documents.
it’s especially handy for folks who blog like dave winer… bursts of tight news quips interspersed with long, rich essay-like content that feels too fat to live on scripting.com.
sort of how he’s using wordpress.com. but well defined. header, subheader, footer, contextual info, etc.
my opinion? they’ve now got versioned, non-temporal content publishing. next up: labels with gmail, blogger, reader and base tie-ins to continue to define, link and catalog your content.
all pieces of a larger, web-only ‘office.’
m3mnoch.
m3mnoch - the web essay writing market must be big for Google to take it *this* seriously
We all must drop the presumption of competence when talking about Google - its the pundits who are talking about Google taking over and building a web-based office, all that I can see from Google themselves is haphazard releases of disjointed features.
um. kind of.
i’m not thinking google is going to take over the world by any stretch. i think microsoft is actually pretty far ahead of them in this game. they weren’t a year ago. they are now.
besides, have you ever wondered how the word processor became the ‘killer app’ for the personal computer?
i just used dave winer’s essays as an easy to digest example. saying it’s only for essays is like saying a website is only for essays.
blogs are inherently tied to a moment in time. where does the cool content you write that you constantly link to live? do you put it in links in your sidebar? why does wordpress.com have ‘pages?’ where do you write your scrible notes that you want to reference from your computer in the den? in a gmail draft?
add, essentially, tagging/opml to loosely join all this content together in this glorious world without navigation web ui experts are always talking about and you have something like google pages. or officelive. or even writely to some extent.
no. it has nothing to do with google taking over the world. i probably jaded all of the backlashers out there when i used the words ‘office’ and ‘google’ in the same thought.
ah well. whatever.
it’s the next evolution of publishing/sharing information. we need endpoints to all these neat reading lists that guide folks towards non-time sensitive content, right? it’s just disassociating a post with a timestamp.
how many time have you said something along the lines of ‘i need to write that down but my readers really won’t care about it?’
m3mnoch.
Thanks!
Already testing!
I wish I was a spammer. Then I would write a little application that filters out the username of the url username.googlepages.com and add @gmail.com to it. The url is in direct relation of the user’s e-mail address which is not a smart thing!
Is it just me or the whole thing looks like a power point presentation. Everywhere you see pages, think of slides. Layout selection, design selection the view of the pages. If they add some pictures, typical flux diagrams and a save as power point format it would be enough. Only useful with some collaborative tools as well.
Google Pages is back.
I fully agree with Bart. Using sitename.googlepages.com would have been a lot more clever then username.googlepages.com/sitename/.
This definately is an interesting new product. I just can’t explore it much due to errors everywhere!
Google seems to be on the verge of one day I bet they’ll sell hosting at cheap prices!
one word:
http://www.web20generator.com
Has anyone tried inserting a 3rd party content feed into their site? I’ve tried a few different ones can can’t get them to work. Would they possibly be blocking outside feeds?
What Google can offer and other home page hosting services can’t:
Unlimited bandwidth.
No indication of bandwidth limits in the help pages.
This is not GoogleCities. Nor is it MySpace, or Blogger Lite, or any other kind of toy otherwise aimed at the Flickr set.
This is the Yellow Pages.
Google very much wants to go after the enormous population of local advertisers that currently pours several billion dollars into phone directories. Google wants ads for dry cleaners on your block to show up when you search for “laundry.” And Google wants to do pay for click and pay for call for this customer base.
The problem? Your local dry cleaners don’t have web sites. Why would they? No web site, no pay per click.
Some things to expect over the coming months: 1) directory information (address, phone number) built directly into GooglePages; 2) integration with a stripped down version of Adwords, perhaps with standard business categories built into the interface; 3) integration with some form of phone presence.
I think Adam nails it. Did you know that Advertisers as a whole spent more on the Yellow Pages in 2005 then they did on AdSense?
Think about that for a second.
The yellowpages have been a major cash cow for the telcos and others for a LONG time. Similar to the cash cow of the classifieds in the newspapers.
The online ventures of the yellow pagers themselves have mostly abysmal, not adding value and creating horrid webpages.
Google Local is now many early-adopters yellow pages. What it’s lacking is recognition from local business that this is the new Yellow Pages.
By offering homepages for business, in an easy-to-use format that is a. free and b. offers guaranteed visibility through Base, Froogle (local), and Google Local, you’ve just created a potential yellow-page killer.
It could be a tool to create a front end to Google Base content. The bloggers complaining that this is not a blogging tool need to understand that not everything on the web should be a blog and based on the journal metaphor. That said, this tool could be eventually applied to be an editor for a blog or wiki.
Google is very smart to under engineer this type of project, get user feedback, and then evolve it rather than over engineering the tool at the start and put potential feedback providers in the position where they would be less able to provide input on how to get there from here.
Just a few observations:
First, great ideas such as Google Pages will likely get adopted and enhanced by none other than the YellowPages.com, YellowBook.com, SuperPages.com, etc. (assuming it’s not being offerred right now).
Second, if the target market is local businesses, then the idea is much more likely to gain traction within the yellow pages industry. Why? Because the industry leaders already have a customer base in which to present such ideas for additional $$$s. And, because this concept is much more complimentary to the yellow pages industry (via online yellow pages websites) than the search industry.
I believe all of the yellow pagers offer some version of this, although it is not free and is a revenue generator as an upsell.
You’re right that the yellow pages are already in place to make this work, but as more and more people leave the crappy yellow pages site(s) and move to local.google, it will be a much easier sell for Google.
However, you rightly imply that it all hinges on the success of Google’s local product. If it doesn’t have the users, then it won’t have the drive.
I think the morale of the story is - when you’ve got a big audience it doesn’t matter what you release because you will always be able to attract new inexperienced users just by having your product “built-in”. This is how companies like AOL still remain relevant and Intel’s video cards still dominate the market.
If it wasn’t from Google we wouldn’t even be discussing it. So why are we?
I’m not about to give up MS Front Page or Mac’s Text Wrangler for this.. but it’s a cute web editor. I made a “Great Hamburgers” in the bay area page.
http://alsmail10.googlepages.com/home
I wonder what google’s vision on this is. I suppose if I make a web site with this app about some subject, they may think I’m very interested in that subject, and might alter my text ads when I use search or gmail based on that knowledge. It’s sort of more focused than my blog posts might be from day to day.
p.s. I’m not that much into hamburgers, but that subject just came to mind when I was trying the pages app.
It is rather clear where this is going in terms of Google strategy.
Here’s my line of thought:
Fact: Google is creating all the elements that a business owner needs to start a business online.
- Payment solution (announced recently)
- Blogger to connect with customers
- Advertising (adsense/ adwords)
- email and chat
- Analytics to attract and retain customers efficiently.
- Product exposure tools (Froogle)
One thing they need to increase the market for all these products is to give the little man an easy way to become a virtual store owner. This is how eBay makes a substantial amount of money.
So Google will give people the ability to create their own websites with all the elements they need to become merchants. Google pages is their first take at the tool which will tailor those sites.
Nir Ben-Dor
I write for Linkadelic Magazine, you can too.
http://www.comagz.com/webmagazine/
I think there’s a couple of points which have been missed. Yes, it’s a fullish market segment, the content diy/cms/blog engine space. But…we’re all (probably by definition of reading and posting to this) undeniably geeky. The real question here is whether your mum has a web page, and if not, why not? The answer is, it’s actually still quite hard, if you’re non-tech *at all*. Google is attacking that, and I think the simplification of the UI here is to be encouraged. Second, I hope this will make a difference to CMS companies- it has refreshing aspects that aren’t often found even on major enterprise systems. Having said all that, I’d agree that the google focus feels a little, er, blurred. Just where is it they are going with all this stuff….?
mike i think you ar willy good i m from slovinia in the europ
google faces a real challange with consumer trust at this point - making this ‘pages’ effort challanged by smaller players. i think users mistrust in google, et al, will grow as political and cultural events spur a mistrust in the once felt trust in ‘big established players’.
Google’s going to have to buy others and demi-disguise their investment.
If FOX had launched MySpace the ‘mavens’ would never have showed up and lit the flames of the masses. But, FOXs’ buyout was done well, they left the MySpace brand in tact while keeping their fingers out of the features pot. Google’s ‘pages’ features may have had a large niche of non-bloggers but with their brand all over it, well, i doubt it will hit big.
Warning to all readers !
According to onedegree.com blog Google pages includes a big privacy problem. It is advised not to use it at the moment.
More:
http://www.comagz.com/webmagaz.....e_strategy
http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/0.....ogle-pages
I tried this last night.
Doesn’t work with Safari.
“I just can’t help thinking that this product feels unfocused and underdeveloped - especially coming from a company such as Google.”
Nik, this really has to be some kind of ancillary service. You cant forget this isnt just another “web2.0 product” this is just someting google is developing into their huge array of products and services in the general scheme of things to take over the “online world.”
It is impossible to compare or relate this to a web2.0 product. It doesnt matter if google can or cannot compete, they already have a huge userbase and if they can leverage that ever so slightly with anything, then it will work.
Also at this stage but they have closed the service down with a notification for when it opens.
What about blogger? There hasn’t been an update to blogger in over a year. oh, sorry I forgot about the Blogger for WOrd toolbar. lame GOOG.
Frankly, I’m not sure how this competes with Yellow Pages more than any other random webpage. Yellow Pages are valuable because they’re made of real paper pages and don’t need to be found somewhere on the internet with a computer, assuming you have one and its handy.
I was not satisfied much, probably I expect more from Google, I expected a very different kind of UI and features for users than what they have given now.
I would like to see complete web design solutions at one place where a user gets a whole lot of features like,web pages,blog,photo album and more, by giving such features user will publish more content in a single place rather than adding web pages on one site, maintaining blog in another and uploading photos on other site.
I see that Google already owns most of such features why not integrate all these applications and offer a great package to user. It is up to the user what application he wishes to enable and start using them.
Being more ambitious probably advanced user be given a whole set of AJAX toolkit to create their own mini applications!!
I don’t think I am asking fro more from Google
and don’t need to be found somewhere on the internet with a computer, assuming you have one and its handy.
Yes but this is long term thinking… your mobile phone, your office computer, your car, your home… all will have access to local.google.com
Why PageCreator is not integrated with Blogger. Why Blogger isn’t integrated with Orkut. I’m trying to figure out!
It seems even with it’s faults that Google Pages is being heavily looked at. Now you must to added to a waiting list via your email to get access.
Google Pages seems kind of blah to me. Feels more like a move to counter Microsoft’s free web hosting move. Maybe we’ll see something unique come from this, but right now it strikes me as kind of boring and feels like no real effort when into building a nice site builder.
See, combine this with Google Base, Maps.Google.com, Gmail (now with chat), and their continued push to make it all available on mobile devices and you have a rich, who what when and where, service that can cater to individuals and small business.
Link your businesses Base catalog with your Pages page, have it show up on Maps, and be available to communicate directly with the business/person and you’ve got a very interesting suite of products.
Will Google be able to handle all that though? I don’t want to cripple them with success.
we are working on a project might be another choice for ppl other than google’s. But we must speed up according to the situation.
Wireless World: Not just for nebbishes
CHICAGO, Feb. 24 (UPI) — A few years ago wireless data networks were a novelty, something that only nebbishes enjoyed, and no one else really understood, or cared to understand. Now they’re a business necessity — for the corporate office or home office, supplementing, but in some cases supplanting, wired infrastructure, experts tell United Press International’s Wireless World. That’s changing the way we work, and reshaping our expectations about the office environment.
A new report released this week by Synergy Research Group, based in Reno, Nevada, indicates that wireless local area network equipment sales continued their surge during the fourth quarter of last year, growing seven percent during the period, and 13 percent for the entire year. By Gene Koprowski
I belive it’s a one night build service from google just to catch up with office live. more upload space is cool though.
Seems like a cool idea at first, but you have to think about it: what exact use would there be for this? Blogging? I guess that could work, except I for one would rather use Blogger or else host Wordpress or something. How about a private website? I’m guessing that makes more sense, but this isn’t going to draw alot of people away from MySpace, Xanga or MSN Spaces. I think Google should re-think their plan.
Nice try.
Google is a big question mark… Are they throwing all of these “little” things out in an attempt to throw off the competition, while developing something much larger? Or are they going to integrate all of these little services into something big?
Either way, the market Google is in (search) has no barrier to entry and no customer stickiness. A search engine is a search engine, and the first one to build something better will probably succeed - unless someone from GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) buys them out.
I just heard about this earlier today and then I was browsing blogs on technorati and came across your blog. What will Google think of next?
In the future, the following query in Google might return quite a few pages:
site:pagetastic.com | site:googlepages.com
It returns all indexed pages created with the new Google Page Creator tool. The thing is, your sub-domain – e.g. john.doe.googlepages.com – will always be your Gmail address. And spammers, as we know, like nothing better than to get a lot of email addresses to send their spam too. Soon, they’ll have another way to harvest those addresses.
For Mac users, while it doesn’t work in Safari, as mentioned above (Google suggests downloading IE!), it functions fine with Camino.
So web-design newcomers on OSX aren’t just limited, and that is the right word, to iWeb.