Two Opinions on Google’s Page Creator

Google’s recent page creator has drawn some conflicting views. I’ll pluck two out here.

Scoble is broadly in favour:

I see a lot of bloggers saying “so” about Google’s new Web Page Creator. I think bloggers often miss the larger conversation that we should be having: the Office Live team tells me that 45% of small businesses don’t have a Web site at all.

Congrats to Google for trying to do something to bring more people onto the Web. That’s the conversation we should be having.

While Dave Winer states:

This evening Google launched a totally unremarkable page creator web app. It’s a nice Ajax text editor, with templates, but why isn’t it part of Blogger, or at least connected to Blogger, and where is the feed? The sites have no structure.

Where is the Mind of Google these days? Seems to be back in the mid-90s, re-discovering Geocities. Give me a ring when there’s at least some rudimentary content management in there.

I’m actually with Scoble on this one. I think a lot of the criticisms are missing the point. Some people don’t want a blog, they don’t want to update their sites on a daily basis. I think this is a good, easy to use solution for folk who just want to have a few photos up on the web, or a message to pass on to friends or family. Issues like CMS and RSS would mean nothing to these people, and nor should they.

In truth, the new Google service simply isn’t for people like Winer, or indeed Scoble. I myself can’t think of a reason why I would need to use it. But for the thousand’s of non tech-savvy web users out there, it could be really helpful.

Stikipad

Stikipad, which I mentioned in my brief round up of wikis recently, has now made it’s free account have unlimited edits. Thank goodness sanity has prevailed – 5 edits would be nowhere near enough for someone to work out whether the service was worth paying for or not. A good example of a company listening to their users’ views.

Thanks to Matt at Stikipad for the email informing me about the change – I’ll be giving the service another try soon.

Google Page Creator

Google has released another new service: this time a web page editor and host. Not really a competitor to it’s own Blogger service, this system just produces flat sites, so really it should be seen as belonging to the same breed as Yahoo!’s GeoCities (is it still called that?)

Anyway, I have been having a play, and it’s actually quite good. For those who have no problems ethically with using Google, and who have few web skills but nevertheless want a small personal web page, I would genuinely recommend it.

What Google really need to do is integrate this in some way with the Personalised Portal – so that people can have their Google Page with RSS feeds displayed too.