They acquired JotSpot wiki some time back. So are they using their JotSpot technology to power this Google sites? Can you please name the competition in this space.

I`ve already got a few blogspot blogs, google really makes it easy to set up a
page even if you don`t know anything about website design.

I`m definitly gonna give Google Sites a try, too.

Google Sites is quite simple to use. perfect for small company

wow, this is really good

comparable to 37signals basecamp software…i dig this alot!

This is interesting - but it’s a shame the URLs are so convoluted.

If you want to know why Google did this, just check out this Quantcast graph:

http://www.quantcast.com/sites.google.com/traffic

Less than 65K monthly uniques was not getting it done, especially considering the fact that Google rolled out the red carpet for the launch blitz.

It looks especially bad in comparison to WetPaint’s 750K monthly uniques or (blatant plug) PBwiki’s 1 million monthly uniques.

I think that Google’s strategy was to try to use Google Sites to drive Google Apps adoption; when that failed, they shifted to plan B by making the product generally available.

I tried to use Google Sites as well. However, I wasn’t that impressed. I’ll check back in November, hope to see more improvements.

I think Google Sites is best used with the rest of the Google Apps family. I’m sure this could be useful for some though.

@Chris Yeh

Nice try, but Google said all along that Sites would be available to the general public when they launched it. Your thoughts on their strategy and your opinions of their success or lack there of are meaningless because, well, you are firmly in their crosshairs.

You have a lot to lose if they are even mildly successful with this so it comes as no surprise at all that you would take such a negative tone with your post.

Instead of looking at their numbers after 3 months lets look again at 12 months, or 24 or even 36. I would bet that you will be singing a much different tune by then.

i’ve registed many sites with shot names,such as soft,java etc,it sounds really good~~~~~~~

I wouldn’t use google sites for anything, but the UI looks really nice.

Google Sites is a let down for me (thus far).

While I do enjoy many of Google’s products (such as Blogger, Analytics, and yes even Orkut) sites seems to be an attempt to catch up to competitors such as WetPaint and Wikipedia.

Is it me, or is the innovation steam slowly leaving Google?

Wow very cool im going to set one of these pages today. What a great way to share photos and ideas with my family across country.

very interesting — could be good for an intranet for mid-market.

I don’t understand what’s the big deal about this thing. A web page builder tool like the 90s geocities made by reusing google’s docs/ajax UI components. Its the same html forms Google has been building in Gmail, docs , Health and now sites too. No innovation, no edge. And Randy, Chris is right because now that Google has decided to throw its weight around it might get more growth but the fact is pbwiki surpassed it in initial runs. To invalidate your claim, even officelive.com , a closed service has 60x more traffic than google sites.

I wonder how many people actually want to do absolutely everything on Google.

Peter
do you follow me @ http://twitter.com/peterurban

…albeit related to another Google product….

So I check my email this morning and find a new little blue letter in the top left hand corner of my gmail. ‘Reader.’ After watching their intro video I was initially wow’d as Google tools usually wow me…’An inbox, not for email, but for the entire web’ (i’m calling it the www-inbox, lol 4 clever) but then I thought a second about it…Holy crap this could DESTROY TEH INTERNETZ!!!!

Here’s why… You browse a major website’s main page (take ESPN or BBC) to look for stories and then go to some link that takes you ‘further’ into the site. The content creators for the site can profit from that main-page view as well as the content views as you peruse through all the sites pages. This www-inbox effectively removes that main-page hit.

Now you could argue RSS feeds have already been doing this kind of thing…and that this is basically an RSS inbox. True…but its one that works really well and that should be disconcerting for content creators (if this thing becomes really popular).

However since the entire stories are not being published in this www-inbox (yet)…and since right now it is merely like a feature that acts as a centralized ‘already searched for you’ search results…I digress…It’s not that bad. However this does give Google an interesting opportunity to wrap up another advertising cash flow. Say for instance this thing becomes really popular, Google could offer sites their main page hits ‘back to’ the content creators by offering to display their advertising through this service. Google of course would receive some compensation; or Google could just force the advertising all their own and come out the bigger winner.

(Note to self, analyze GOOG: Long Position)

A note on the features…reading everything in Google text is not exactly attractive either. I mean I go to ESPN.com…I’m use to Red and Black, and a video, etc. to get caught up on meh sports. TechCrunch - same thing, Green and White, etc and tech news stays in meh head as such. It’s goofy but it compartmentalizes teh stories in meh brain!

So maybe there’s no harm, no foul…but we’ll see. It should be interesting.

ARE YOU KIDDING?

GOGGLE SITES HASNT WORKED, DOESNT WORK, IS NOT DOCUMENTED AND IS A FRAUD PRODUCT. AS USUAL, ITS DOWN NOW AND MY DATA IS LOST!!! HELP US ALL.

Must still give it an honest try. I’m trying pbwiki now to complement my other tools. So far I’m happy with the UI of pbwiki.
But true @peterurban, I’m already quite dependent on GApps and GMail and GCalendar…
@tech pr Have you taken a look at http://www.wikimatrix.com/

Functionality is better but UI is much better in Microsoft Office Live.

Can anyone compare Google Site Vs Microsoft OfficeLive web design software?

Nice video from my cousin explaining the website app.

Great! Now we have 3 similar services from Google that do almost exactly the same thing!

Google Pages, Google Groups and Google Sites. How ridiculous is that? Can’t they integrate them?

Are the public pages built with Sites going to be indexed by google, the search engine? What will the page rank be for those pages ?

“can be edited by the public at large”

I think you need to do a little more investigation. A page that you create on this can be VIEWED by the public at large, but I haven’t seen as yet the ability to be able to let the public at large to EDIT the pages.

Here’s what the “advanced” settings lets you do:

“Anyone in the world may view this site (make it public)”

Frankly saying, it’s a pretty lame attempt. Didn’t pages.google.com teach them that they can’t compete in this space? What about pages.google.com anyway?

I think adoption will be very low. We help lot of startups and small businesses for their IT services. We typically setup their Emails / Google Apps. What I have seen is that overall adoption of Google Apps itself is negligible. Maybe it will catch up in time but right now I don’t see it being used heavily.

I created a test site like most of you might have done and I think for some time that is the kind of traffic it will attract.

@Randy,

The issue with launching Sites without making it available to the public is that it says one of three things:

1) We’re going to try to use Sites to drive Apps adoption (my charitable interpretation)

2) We don’t believe the product is scalable, so we’ll deliberately limit growth by restricting it to apps

3) Our marketing team doesn’t understand that the initial launch is the biggest opportunity to make a splash in the marketplace

I’m a fan of many Google products, and I believe that they’ve done a great service by making things like Analytics free, but in this case, the strategy doesn’t seem to add up.

Back when I invested in Ustream, one of the things that absolutely astounded me was that Justin.TV decided to launch prior to have a platform that would allow others to broadcast.

Justin.TV got more press than any startup in history over its first week, including appearing on the Today Show and the Tonight Show.

And yet, because they had nothing to offer people other than the ability to watch one guy live his life, they squandered millions of dollars in free publicity.

I’ve always said that Ustream owes Justin & crew a big thank you for catalyzing interest in the live streaming space.

What is the difference between what Justin did and the decision to launch Sites without making it available to the public?

It’s kind of a hybrid between a wiki and a team-site. To me the most interesting opportunities for Google sites lies in the collaboration use cases rather than the “build a website” ones. I manage a software product that provides almost identical functionality but for the enterprise. I’m really interested to see what kind of sites/apps the masses build with Google sites.

I’ve been using Google sites and loving it. But they’ve had a bug for the last few days which doesn’t allow you to edit your pages. Rendering collaboration useless. If you look at their help discussion forum, seems like other people are experiencing this as well. Growing pains, perhaps?

Since its birth in a lasting provided clean slate . Strive to provide the greatest credibility to the public and visitors who are accustomed to search for a way . I firmly believe that Google tries in the coming years to gain a source of information on the World Wide Web through a mechanism called the page Rank as all owners Sites are trying to be a friend of Google from near and far
Shaker you your
Dr. John Smith
University of Florida