Googlepages, day three

I've been playing with Googlepages in odd moments today, and also reading some reviews of it. J.D. Amer has dubbed it Googlecities, which I think is pretty witty. He also thinks it's lame. I can understand that. If it was going to stay the way it is, it would be fairly lame, but still useful for some limited purposes. I don't believe that Google put it out there to leave it as it stands.

I don't know what Google intends, of course. Could be anything from the personal homepage creator that it is now to the beginnings of a new social network to a future full scale hosting solution with paid features. Or something else. All I know is that when Gmail debuted, you couldn't even save a draft. It had some cool features, but was missing some basic things that almost everyone wants in an e-mail service. Now it has more features than you would ever expect to get for free.

And speaking of Gmail, some people have pointed out that your Gmail address is right there in the URL of the Googlepages site. That's true. If your e-mail address is a secret that's going to be a huge problem. One of the concerns, however, is spam. Gmail's spam filters work so well that spam is no longer a problem for me. So little winds up in my inbox that it's not worth mentioning and there are few, if any, false postives, so I don't have to spend time looking through the filtered spam to make sure that nothing's there that I want. This wasn't true when Gmail was brand new either. I also don't think that's the way most spam harvesters work, although I'm sure new bots are being created for the purpose even as this is written.

Then there's Blogger. Blogger still lacks some things that we'd like, but it was a short time ago when it didn't have comments or image hosting. Those, along with a number of other features, have been added in recent months. Google works in mysterious ways and in its own good time, but it does work.

I'd say that Googlepages is a service to watch. Of course, there's no predicting Google's schedule on it. Could be months or it could be years before it fully takes shape.


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