We knew this was coming soon. Google recently released a new service, Google Page Creator, allowing users to create web pages and publish them on the Internet. What a surprise, the service is currently in beta. Does google have any products that are not in beta, other than their cash-cow search engine, that is?
I signed up for this service a few days ago, but as usual I landed on a page informing me that it had become too popular and they were slowly adding users. So I was instructed to wait for the invitation email before I could utilize the service. Great, I've been waiting on Google Analytics' invitation for months now.
I never received that invitation, but somehow I was able to log in to the service a day later and give it a spin. At this point Page Creator is nothing more than a simple static Web page designer. There is a design page with some basic html design features to put together simple pages. There are also some design templates available to choose from. I believe users get a 100 Meg storage to create and publish their pages. The final URL of the published pages becomes http://XYZ.googlepages.com/, where XYZ is the name of the user's Gmail account name.
I suppose this service was released in response to similar services from Yahoo and Microsoft. I wrote about Microsoft's Office Live in my last blog, which is basically a Web hosting deal. Office Live Basics (free version) gives users their own domain names with a number of email addresses which makes it more valuable than the current incarnation of Google Page Creator. One caveat of Google Page Creator is its URL convention. The first portion of the URL (host name) gives away user's Gmail address, something that might be undesirable to users as surfers (including spammers) can easily infer the site creator's email.
As for usability, there isn't much wow factor in Google Page Creator, other than the fact that it's a Google product and users can get a published URL under the googlepages.com domain. Who knows if those pages would get special treatment from GoogleBot? Anyways, Google already had a similar publishing service with Blogger.com, and this blog is published courtesy of that service.
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