Google offers users their own pages on Web

Google offers users their own pages on Web

JOINS OTHER FIRMS IN PUSHING COMMUNITY-CREATED CONTENTBy Elise AckermanMercury NewsGoogle continued its effort to spark more user-generated content, unveiling an online service Thursday for creating personal Web pages and offering 100 megabytes of free storage to people who use it.
Demand for ``Google Page Creator'' quickly swamped the free service Thursday morning, causing it to shut down temporarily.
``We decided in advance to limit the number of page sign-ups in order to provide users with an optimal publishing experience,'' spokeswoman Megan Quinn said in a statement. ``Due to extraordinary demand, we recently reached the limit so we have temporarily paused additional sign-ups.''
New sign-ups would be offered ``very soon,'' Quinn said.
Both Google and Yahoo have been expanding beyond Internet search to develop services and technology that let Internet users create and share their own content online. The field of user-generated content is flourishing with video-sharing services like YouTube and networking sites like MySpace.
On Thursday, some online pundits compared Google's new service to Yahoo's GeoCities, an online community of millions of Web-page-based homesteaders that Yahoo acquired in May 1999.
Both Yahoo and Google also offer social networking services that encourage users to record their connections to one another online.
Last year, Yahoo acquired a popular photo-sharing service named Flickr, augmenting its existing photo sharing and storage services. A few months later, Google launched Google Base, a giant database that it invited users to fill with any kind of content they wanted -- photos, job listings and more.
Google's new Web page service complements Blogger, a free online service that lets people publish regularly updated online commentary.
Designed for use by tech novices, Page Creator offers ready-to-use designs and a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface. The application is browser-based, which means there is no software to download. The hosting is provided by Google for free and a Gmail account is required.