So, Google Pages eh? It’s nothing earth-shattering, although I think the WYSIWYG editor works quite well; it’s very easy to tell what’s going on, which should make it an absolute doddle for anybody who has never done this sort of thing to get stuff published on the internet.
But you have to wonder why? Making it easy for people to get stuff up on the web is hardly a new idea. I like what Dave Winer said:
Where is the Mind of Google these days? Seems to be back in the mid-90s, re-discovering Geocities.
Meanwhile Jack Schofield notes that “it’s pretty much limited to information, personal and vanity pages.” And let’s face it, with MySpace and goodness knows how many other websites of that ilk floating around, vanity spaces are hardly thin on the ground.
When I looked at the templates I expected them to match the Blogger templates, but they don’t. I would have thought it would be obvious to link this in with Blogger so that their users could easily make ‘about me’ or other pages.
So it’s pretty underwhelming. I have a theory that Google will now just churn out any old rubbish because of all the publicity it creates. Google Pages has been riding high on del.icio.us for the past couple of days, everybody’s talking about Google, everybody remembers Google still exists, and so on.
For the record, this is what I created. As you can see, I went for the minimalist approach…
Almost anything Google does these days can be understood according to three goals:
– Get as much info into their index as possible
– Get as much info about users as possible, for targeted advertising
– Get Google set as the default search for as many situations as possible