The Cabbage Patch

Hello World.

Each Wednesday, I will be featuring a different “Web 2.0” website and providing a sort of mini-review. These may include new services that are better than their competitors, sites that are unique and do things differently, or simply sites that stand out as being useful.

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Yes, I know. It’s Friday. I can explain.

Wednesday became a write-off for me as I had to spend almost the entire day at Uni orientation. It was interesting and informative and everything else it was supposed to be, only it took all day. Add to that the four hours or so of travelling I had to do that day, and you can see that I had no time for writing lengthy articles.

Now I had fully intended to write this on Thursday, remaining almost-on-schedule. But something extraordinary happened. I was preparing to write about Google Reader (and perhaps I still shall next week), but as I was exploring the back streets of Googleville for info and pics I made a startling discovery.

The Google Labs page had been updated without my knowledge. This in itself was reasonably unusual (these things don’t usually slip by me easily), but what was more extraordinary was that I appeared to be one of the first people to have stumbled upon this. I searched high and low, but I could not find any information about this new service I had found.

It only took a matter of half an hour before all the major tech-news sites had also found it, but I felt proud for a few minutes at least.

What was my amazing discovery?

Google Page Creator.

(screenshot from here)

This new service from Google is a remarkable implementation of an old idea. Personal homepages are as old as the Internet itself - sites such as GeoCities and Myspace have been doing it for years. And now, with the emergence of blogging, personal sites are becoming even more common.

However, it isn’t unusual for Google to do things a little differently. In this case, they have taken that age-old idea, ripped out all the useless junk that makes those millions of home-made free pages so painful to look at, and made it so easy that a blind ferret could use it.

So, what’s it for?

Google Page Creator is for… well, creating pages. It can be used to create a single, one-off page or an entire simple website. And what’s more, it can be done in a matter of minutes.

I created this simple page in all of about 10 minutes, however it can also be used to make much more complicated pages, such as this.

Each account can have as many pages as they want, and up to 100MB of storage. This can be used for almost anything - music, videos, pictures, or HTML files for the more web-savvy.

This makes the Google pages very useful for many circumstances. Say I wanted to create a simple page about a recent holiday. I could have a professional-looking page up, complete with photos from my trip, in a few minutes which I could then link to friends. Or maybe I am a budding film-maker who wants to quickly and cheaply share my portfolio to investors. I could have a page describing me and my work with links to my email, a few screen-shots from short-films I have made, and a sample video.

Google Page Creator works from your Gmail Account, which you can sign up for on the site (at the time of this writing, account creation has been suspended - email me if you are interested and I can send you a Gmail invite). Like most Google services, it is free. Unlike most Google services, it is currently also ad-free.

A good review with screen-shots can be found here.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Articles.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.