Google Aims for Big International Growth for Sites

Early this year, Google released "

- an intranet to centralize company information;

- a team site to manage a project;

- a profile site including an individual's resume, areas of expertise, and goals for the quarter; and

- a virtual classroom to post homework assignments, class notes and other resources.

The platform allows people to embed content from YouTube, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Picasa as well as upload files of any type, and customize the look and feel of the site. Since the initial announcement, things have been relatively quiet on the Google Sites front, although over a million sites have so far been created

That number is likely to increase now because Google has opened up the platform to 37 new languages including: Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, English (UK), Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

"The latest release includes full localized versions of the Google Sites service and interface, enabling website creators and collaborators to interact more naturally with the product in their native languages,"
It will be interesting to see how much of an increase in use occurs as a result of the new language options. Do you use Google Sites? What is your opinion of it?