March 1, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Google has launched Google Sites as part of its Google Apps service, the company announced yesterday. According to the company, Google Sites “makes creating a team website as easy as editing a document” and through a variety of permission settings, sites can be shared “with a small group, your entire organization, or the world”.
Google Sites allows groups of people to work on a single site and “embed rich content” from other Google services - videos (YouTube), docs and spreadsheets (Google Docs), presentations, photo slide shows (Picasa), and calendars (Google Calendar). In addition, sites can utilize “new free-form content” and “customization options let you give your Google Site your own look and feel”. The service does not require knowledge of HTML and offers a range of different types of pages including announcements. The services’ “file cabinet” page allows users to upload files of 10MB or less and has 10GB of storage available (Google Apps Premier and Education editions get an additional 500MB for each user account).
Although this is aimed at workers collaborating on projects and does not appear to be a service that mirrors traditional hosting services, it is sure to make inroads into traditional web hosts’ business, and certainly provide a viable alternative to services such as Microsoft office Live Small Business. How long it will be before the both Microsoft and Google will follow the Yahoo! model of actively pursuing web hosting business with unlimited storage and bandwidth, only time will tell, but the chances of it appearing on the horizon relatively shortly appear to be high.
