Google released a new product overnight called Google Pages and one has to wonder why?!
Google Pages gives you the ability to create simple web pages through a simple online web editor but it is missing so much as to be pre-pre-alpha (although, in Fairness to Google they do say it is a Beta (isn’t everything these days?).
It doesn’t run in Safari:
and in Firefox (on my Mac, at least) many of the icons don’t load – see the broken images on the top-left below:
Other things missing are:
- RSS Feeds for changes to web pages (as Dave Winer noted)
- Web Standards compliance – although the sites output are xhtml strict, <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1
UPDATE:
I se ResourceShelf is reporting that the Google page site are not accepting any more registrants for the moment. Demand has exceeded their expectations once more seemingly (remember Google Analytics signup debacle anyone?) – attempted new logins now get the message:
Oops…Thank you for your interest in Google Page Creator! Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new. Thank you for your patience.
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.
Like any nerd I looked for the edit raw html button but there appears to be no way to edit the entire page html! The solution is all to simple upload html files from the upload box. Be fair to google you would be jumping for joy if geocities came out with a fast free completely ad free hosting service which is what this is googles answer to homestead and geocities and in that capacity it excels
I found Google page creator as a wonderful tool. There are still few holes in that.
As mentioned earlier RSS is not supported yet. Same is supported by blogger.com… this is quite surprising. Initially firefox have the issue of not displaying icon properly, but in my new verson of firefox 2.0.0.1, everything works fine…Thanks to Firefox…
Custom layouts are not much more flexible… i have had a hardtime to tackle with them for my application.
Also they don’t have scrap option. I didn’t find any option to provide comments.
There are still many more…
cheers,
JM