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Google has added yet another application to the Google Apps suite. Google Sites gives you the ability to create collaborative workspaces on-the-fly, at no cost. If you’ve got a Google Apps account, you’ll be able to create an unlimited number of these sites. You can restrict access to specific users, open it up to all users from your domain, or make the site entirely public.

Anyone with proper permission can go in and make edits or create new pages, just like your typical wiki. In addition, you can add Google Widgets, Google Docs and a number of other pre-built tools.

Many analysts, including Michael Arrington at Techcrunch, are speculating that Google Sites is intended to compete with Microsoft Sharepoint.

Personally, I don’t see this as a Sharepoint killer, not because it lacks features, but because the large enterprises that typically use Sharepoint are too security-conscious to trust their family jewels to someone outside the firewall. Where Google Sites fits nicely is for small organizations, ad-hoc teams, communities and other groups without either the resources nor the need for an internally hosted solution.

I’m doing some testing with my crew at BigBlueBall and some of the projects we’re working on, and it looks promising. Google Sites is similar to a wiki in that anyone with permission can edit a page or create new pages, and the revision history is saved for reference. Where it’s different is that it uses a much friendlier design environment rather than wiki-tags. It’s not quite WYSIWYG, but it’s fairly easy to grasp for anyone who knows their way around the web.

Digsby is a new multi-network IM (AIM, ICQ, WLM, Jabber, GTalk, Yahoo) that also integrates your email and social network accounts on Facebook and Myspace. It’s in private beta, but this site has screenshots, initial impressions, and invites.

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Happy Saturday morning. I’ve just got a couple of interesting links to share.

Google Blogscoped has an interesting post with screenshots describing Google’s intranet. It’s interesting to see what the employees experience from inside the firewall.

Over at BigBlueBall, Fanatic posted statistics from an interesting study that shows 20% of all instant messages are never sent.  Maybe it should be called instant hesitation?

And because it’s Saturday morning, I thought something completely different was in order. I previously posted the link to Banksy on my del.icio.us bookmarks, but he warrants more attention. And if you live near an Urban Outfitters store, they have an excellent Banksy coffee table book for sale.

I’ve been a big fan of Google Maps ever since it’s public release. The graphics are great. The ability to pan is cool. The API makes for some really neat mashups. Yes, Google Maps are fabulous, but the beta of Yahoo Maps is better.

If you’ve used Yahoo Maps before, the “old” service is still the default, but the beta is open and available to anyone.

Why do I like the new Yahoo Maps?
The Yahoo Maps beta is a lot like Google Maps. The map graphics have the same quality. You can click-and-drag to dynamically pan. Both Google and Yahoo have published APIs for extending their map services through mashups. Zooming is actually a bit cooler on Yahoo — with an animated zoom effect.

But there are three things that really set the Yahoo Maps beta apart from Google Maps.

1. Birdseye View - After using CAD programs like AutoCAD and Microstation for many years, I’ve grown accustomed to the birdseye “finder” that gives you a small thumbnail view of the larger area, with the current view highlighted. Yahoo has done a very nice job of porting this functionality (very appropriately) to their maps. You can scroll by the old click-and-drag panning, or by clicking and dragging the highlighted area withing the birdseye window. Sweet.
2. Find on Map - Google lets you search for local businesses and locates them on the map, but Yahoo adds commonly used categories for drill-down navigation as an option to free-form search. A nice touch, since not everyone is comfortable with search (as I’m constantly reminded in my KM work).
3. Real-time Traffic Data - The real-time traffic data is the icing on the cake. Living and working in Southern California, avoiding traffic is an important part of my life. Sure, there are other websites that provide traffic data, but none of them are as slick and easy-to-use as the Yahoo Maps beta.

Now this beta is really a true beta… it’s not quite ready for prime time. It loads slowly, and is sometimes finicky (as true beta software often is). But it’s reliable enough that I now prefer to use it over Google Maps.

Check it out: Yahoo! Maps Beta

Today’s nugget is Frappr, a mash-up of Google Maps and Flickr-like photo sharing. It looks like a neat way for groups to share a bit about where they’re from. Check it out — I’ve created a group for BigBlueBall.

Technology really is pretty cool.

I’ve extolled the virtues of Flickr and Google Earth before, but now a guy by the name of Rob Roy has linked the two together with FlickrFly. FlickrFly adds a nifty little “Fly to this location” link to your properly geotagged photo. Clicking the link (assuming you’ve installed Google Earth), will take you around the globe and zoom you in on that spot on the big blue ball we live on.

If you’d like to check it out, grab a free copy of Google Earth and click one of the “Fly to…” links to see Sacre Coeur, Place Vendome, Thousand Island Lake in the Minarets (really cool with terrain turned on), or the Golden Gate bridge.

Adding Geotags
If you use Flickr (and why shouldn’t you… it’s free!), it’s now even easier to add geotags to your photos. There’s a new Greasemonkey script for Firefox called GMiF that puts the power of Google Maps right into Flickr. Makes it really, really easy to point-and-click to tag your photos with the correct latitude and longitude information.

For more on geotagging, check out the Geotagging Flickr group.

Not to be outdone by the excellent third-party Google Map hacks, Google has come out with a hack of their own. Google Ride Finder is an awesome application that uses GPS signals from taxis and plots them on the map. You can see exactly how many taxis are available in your area, and exactly where they are at this moment.

Ride Finder is currently in beta testing, and only available in 12 cities in the U.S., but it is a terrific example of what’s to come.

Next, we’ll have parents tracking their teenage kids…

adj.
1. Highly pleasing or agreeable to the end user, especially the functionality and performance.
2. Very pleasant; delightful: a googlicious web interface.

The knowledge management system I am working on is tightly entwined with Verity’s Ultraseek search engine technology. One of the recurring requests we used to get about search functionality (both the search form and the results) was simple: make it more like Google.

It seems like almost everyone loves Google. And why not? It’s got a simple, no-nonsense interface that puts little in the way between me and my task: to find something. It’s fast. And the results are very accurate. Things should be more like Google. Simple. Purposeful. Incredibly useful… maybe even Indispensable.

So that’s my goal. Create interfaces that are a pleasure to use.

Googlicious.