Rise and Fall

24 February 2006

So Google have sort of launched Google Pages. I say sort of as you can’t actually sign up to use it anymore – it was only open for about half a day as far as I can tell.

Google Pages is Google’s foray into the personal publishing space, excluding their Blogger service, but it is a very poor one. Yes, it allows you to create very simple pages without knowing any html, but you also don’t get any layout or presentational control bar choosing from preset themes and layouts. Other then a sprinkling of AJAX, it all feels very old fashioned, and I really don’t get who there target audience is (the myspace crowd won’t go for it as it has no social linking and no rich media; small business won’t go for something with a googlepage.com domain; parents and home users will want to upload more then just pictures…).

I glossed over Blogger briefly above, but it strikes me very odd that the additional functionality wasn’t added to Blogger in some way – the blog based metaphor doesn’t work for everybody, but they already have all this infrastructure in place that they’re just building again for Google Pages.

It’s a shame; I think we’re finally seeing the downfall of Google – what with the China censoring business, Google Pages, Google Base (what’s up with that?), the embarrassing Video store and the seeming inability for Google to turn a successful product into a mainstream success (see Gmail’s ~5 million subscribers Vs Hotmail’s ~20 million). Also the fact the Google – of all people – can’t seem to scale their products to meet user demand on launch is mighty odd.

So who’s going to take their crown?

From: Articles

24 February 2006