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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."
Can anybody tell me why on this page I get the link to Picassa, but on this one, I get nothing.
Or how about identification of individual people? So that I can outline a section of a given picture and it'll find all other pictures which contain a similar section (AKA a given person).
Then I'll get excited...
Then I'll get scared.
Google will never become another Microsoft. If you think about it, the cost of moving is 0. Google will only be the market leader as long as it is the best. As soon as something better comes out, people will switch over. Google's sucess is based off of how good its product is, Microsoft's success is based off of how well it can lock its consumers in.
A: When they go public. :-/
How many of you (probably would have to be not-so-wet behind the ears) have joined a truly excellent company, gotten your hopes up that "This is the company to last the rest of my career!" -- it's that good -- only to watch it go psycho when the board decides to take it public?
No, the madness doesn't happen overnight. You slowly begin hearing about the symptoms as the pressure begins... "But it's the end of the month! This (shit) has to ship!", etc.
Sad, but true and (by my experience) inevitable. I wish there were no rules which forced a company to commit what is essentially "fiscal lobotomy".
When microsoft "expands" we all bitch and whine, but then google goes out and devours companies and services, and its suddenly "cute".
It is because:
There was other point - you don't trust your data to Google. But since introduction of GMail this is no more true
That's because Microsoft has a proven history of stifling innovation, whereas Google has been doing nothing BUT innovation since their inception. Further, when MS expands, we can expect some technological offshoot of this expansion to be irrevocably tied to the OS with the next service pack, whereas Google still provides a better service while still leaving us the option of having it or not.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
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.
"With the IPO, Google will have huge pockets. This could put Google in the market to buy a much larger player, such as AskJeeves or even AOL," he said.
I don't think the person who wrote this really understands Google's business. Google for the most part has been buying up innovative technologies which require relativley low overhead to run or integrate. I don't view AskJeeves as innovative, and don't view AOL as low overhead by any means.
I know this is nitpicking a small relativly not important part of the article, but it lept out at me as a "huh?" section.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
6. Google is free.
Then, why do they buy a company that produces windows only software ? Shouldn't they go for multiplatform / opensource software ? Isn't this Sun's and IBM's and Novell's strategy ?
This is not insightful - it's a total troll. How is it Google's fault that things you've said show up in searches for your name? That's the point of a search engine. If you say stupid things on the Internet, they're going to be visible whether Google is there or not. The only solution is not being stupid.
- Google has indexed 20 years worth of newsgroups. Again, I can't say I'm too pleased with some of the stuff I posted once (think "alt.binary."). But okay... So did Deja. And if you have Usenet access you could do this yourself.
- Google now "offers" 1G worth of email storage, and warns that they "may" use their searching technology on it. Now they don't even make the effort of ferreting info about you anymore, they plain and simply lure you into giving it to them
- And now the personal information releasing trap widens with this new photo storage thing. hmmm...
What next? in 5 years maybe I'll be able to google my name and see a private mail of mine saying "hey look at that d!rty picture of the secretary on my picasa account! (don't tell anyone about this, hey...)" with a nice link to my private picasa pic? Thanks but no thanks.
Whoa, what a total non sequitur. Google uses their search engine to let you search through your mail and lets you store pictures, so the obvious next step is that Gogole will index your e-mail for public searching?
Give it a rest.
Does it concern anyone else that Google is going the way of Yahoo? Trying to become the end-all-be-all of web services seems a sure way to make all your offerings mediocre at best.
Back in 1997, Yahoo was the cool kid on the block, and was both buying and building every feature under the sun. People lapped it up, and thought it was wonderful to have all their internet needs under one umbrella. Then, reality set it. Yahoo stopped enhancing and in some cases (Yahoo Groups) even maintaining the services. Quality has deteriorated, and the once proud Yahoo brand had withered and crumbled into what is now the K-Mart of the internet.
I guess Google wants to be the Wal-Mart.
Please bid on this Karmann Ghia! Please pleas
Windows only is not a crime. Developing for 90% of the world's PC's only makes sense.
No I didnt spell check this post...
Who says they won't make it crossplatform? They can do anything they want with it now.
I was going to mod you down but decided to respond instead.
Your comment is 100% FUD. Suddenly it's bad that Google is archiving newsgroups? It's not only Google's fault that you posted binaries in the first place, and that you were too dumb to use X-no-archive, but that you can't figure out how to follow their procedure for removing old posts?
And why do you put the word "offer" in scare quotes? Are you implying it's not really an offer, it's something else of unknown malevolence? Look. Google is, above all, a business, not a public service. Yes, they may do unknown, evil twisted things with your email. Poring through it with their grubby little computers, applying their sick, patented algorithms to search for phrases, using your most private thoughts for nefarious adword-enabling purposes. Those bastards!!11!! But hey, here's a clue. Don't sign up for GMail if that's your concern. End of story. There's no reason why their behavior should start to "really disquiet and annoy" you unless you have one of those psychological compulsions that prevents you from turning down free shit.
Maybe you shouldn't post here either. You might say something you regret in 20 years. Oh, too late!
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
If Picasa includes the ability to create online photo galleries, linked to a user's Blogger account so he can publish them on his blog, then it would be quite neat. Not sure if you already know this, but the Picasa company has a tool called Hello that can be used to publish images to your Blogger blog -- not exactly gallery-functionality that you specifically want, but still pretty cool because they're hosting an unlimited number of images for you.