Google launches Office Live... erm.. Google Pages...
The Big Brother launched Google Pages yesterday. Of course, it is in Beta.
Here’s how they are plugging it:
Want to create an online photo tour of your vacation to Bali? An overview of the South American precipitation cycle for your science class? A shrine to your pet ferret?
Google Pages comes five days after Microsoft’s Office Live, which was recently launched amidst fanfare among the A-list bloggers. That’s fast.
Compare this to the launch of Pages and the blogosphere opinions on Google Pages:
- “Google Pages Released” by Nik Cubrilovic on Techcrunch
- “Google Page Creator” by Matt Cutts of Google
- Jeremy Zawodny’s Google Page – Spammers hit the Motherlode!!
- None from Scoble… Interesting…
Some first impressions:
- Google Pages follows Google’s clean design policy.
- Ajaxified Geocities?
- There is a 100 MB limit. ‘Nuff said…
- Intuitive working interface.
What struck me initially as pleasant and later as funny was this: Google Pages in OPEN beta. Seems like they are sending a message across to someone…
So, now, with its foray into personal pages, Google has literally become an all pervading force on the Web. I think I’d better create a list of Google products on listible. Wait, they are gonna buy that one too, right?
There seems to be a 100 page max limit on each user account. Hmmm…
Currently the user accounts are stored as yourgmailusername.googlepages.com which, I admit is ugly. C’mon guys, unleash the spam upon me! Would you be willing to risk that?
But I suspect, they are in the process of securing a deal with one or the other hostname providers to get your own domain name for free.
My bet is it will be either GoDaddy or Register. The former because it is the most popular, the latter because it’s, uhh well, never mind…
There are they haven’t yet incorporated Google Analytics into Google Pages. I suspect it won’t be too long before they do that.
It remains to see how long Pages remains in beta. But I do admit, pages is pretty slick even for a beta. Although it kept going offline quite frequently (every hour or so, frequent by Google standards) You can access mine here.
By the way, I don’t know how many of you have noticed, but all our clicks in Gmail are redirected through this site. Read through the content. eMail marketing, eh? Seems my fears are turning out to be right. Well, time to shut down my Gmail account or what?