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3 Google Tools you (possibly) didn't know about

Written by Jean-Loup Rebours-Smith, on 02-07-2008 16:06

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Google seem to have a knack of coming up with new shiny things on a weekly basis without telling anyone... well they mention it in their various blogs if you know where to follow but if you just go in the Google Products page, these things aren't listed there (yet)...

First is Google Apps, which you can find at http://www.google.com/a

Personally, I'm not too sure how it's meant to work. You can register your domain name on there and manage all sorts of google tools like Calendar, Docs, Mail for your domain. Most of it is in Beta though so it might not all work. You get a partner page (see http://partnerpage.google.com/j-lweb.co.uk for this domain for instance) and various other admin tools, some of which allow you to add aliases for your email.

Now what does puzzle me, is that my domain is registered with a UK company and as far as I know there DNS details haven't been surrendered to Google, nor can I find DNS settings to mess about with name servers and so on.

Needs more investigation but it looks intriguing.

Second is Google Sites, which is available at http://sites.google.com

Remember the good old days when you could create a page with Yahoo Geocities without too much fuss or distraction from ads. The golden age of free hosting wity the like of Lycos being, as far as I can tell, mostly behind us now that we can all have a free blog to express ourselves, it is rather interesting to see Google implement a service like that.

Now obviously it's not just about blogging. You can build your own set of pages, add a news/blog type section, integrate various GToys and have a website in minutes. This service is not quite targetted at Joe Bloggs tring to ermm, blog but more for Groups trying to coordinate their events, colleagues to cooperate on projects or School Teachers to make their material available on line easily. So if you're a group struggling to put something together, check them out and try it out. As with all google services you can set up collaborators so the whole thing doesn't have to be maintained by one single person.

Finally, here is Google Pages, at http://pages.google.com

One little quirk or Google Sites is its limitations in terms of design. Google Pages is pretty much an oversimplified on-line version of Dreamweaver. In other words you have a rich-text interface that allows you to place various page elements. A good idea if you want a sleek Blogger-type website but aren't happy with their various skins and are willing to put a bit of work in designing the look and feel.

These tools are obviously aimed at those who are hosting-challenged and believe it or not, they don't come with ad banners. You have hosting limitations but unless you plan to upload lots of videos (they have You Tube for this), there should be plenty of space there.

Last update : 02-07-2008 16:23