Slashdot Mirror
Google Acquires Picasa, Improves Blogging Tools
clandestine writes "It appears that our lovable search engine has again expanded its horizons - the internet wasn't enough; now you can search and organize your own pictures. I don't know about you, but I use Google for nearly everything; heck, I found links about their acquisition of Picasa through Google News! Any slashdotters going to benefit from this tech, or already do? And yes, the addition of Picasa to their arsenal is a couple of days old, but they just started linking them on the homepage today."
Gmail's 1 GB mailbox without the option to
1. forward the messages
2. move the whole mailbox elsewhere
looks just like locking the consumers in. For example in Yahoo you can buy yourself out by paying $ 20 and upload your 2G anywhere. You can't do this in Gmail.
You can do that with a free Hotmail account with the Gotmail script, and with a free Yahoo acount with the Yosucker script. Both retrieve your data through the proprietary HTML interface of the provider, "mbox'es" the formatting and forward it to the email account of your choice. No need to pay a hapenny for the privilege.
Matter of fact, I use Gotmail to retrieve all of my 50-so hotmail accounts every 30 minutes and forward them to my main pop3 account. I never see the Hotmail site. It works very well indeed.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The term "beta" has lost all useful meaning. Should we withhold judgment on ICQ because it's been in "beta" since 1994? Should we avoid trusting Google News because it's been in beta for two years?
"Beta" is just a way for a company to say "if this breaks, we don't care."
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Google's usefulness is also being expanded by third party developers using their APIs to develop kitschy hits such as Google Fight and Googlism. But there are useful apps too... A recent release is Copyscape which uses Google to find people who have plagiarized your web content. It's from the same guys as Google Alert and works like magic. I reckon it won't be long (after the IPO?) before Google expand their APIs a lot further, to make image, news and group searching available to third party apps. Then things will get really interesting.