Google Sites has finally launched and is available to everyone.
A long time ago on the Internet there was a place called Geo Cities. Geo Cities allowed users to sign up and create a website with a very poor HTML editor. You had to produce your own navigation links and pages. Geo Cities was very popular at first and then began collecting dust and finally faded away.
Today, we now have Google Sites. The service is basically the same – create a website in minutes using your browser, but it’s much simpler and more powerful. Today you can choose from a variety of very nice but simple presentation styles and you start creating pages of content. The service produces all of the navigation and subnavigation for you allowing you to concentrate more effort on what matters – the content.
What makes this service all the more interesting is that it comes with security and syndication. From a security perspective you can share the site the public or lock it down and only share it with other Google Accounts. From a syndication perspective you can “subscribe” to changes on all or more pages which means you can track updates in your favorite Feed Reader instead of having to “check” the site every so often to see what’s new.
What’s it good for? Well, just about anything. On a personal level you can use it to plan just about anything where you need to share content with people. For a business you can use it to plan events, write newsletters (but distribute them elsewhere), etc.
If you need to create a temporary site for collaborative work then I suggest you give Google Sites a test run!
