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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."
Seems like Google is expanding to more areas of our internet lives... Would this be another Microsoft coming?
Yet a faster way to find pr0n... thanks google!
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
This might be awesome, or it might not. I'm not overly impressed with Google's web picture search, so I'm not gonna hold my breath on this one. Their forte is search of text, and sure, you can put a million keywords or a clever description on each picture, but that doesn't really help me. I want to be able to sketch a rough version of the picture and have the system find all images which match it. 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...
~i = an imaginary being~
When microsoft "expands" we all bitch and whine, but then google goes out and devours companies and services, and its suddenly "cute".
Can anybody tell me why on this page I get the link to Picassa, but on this one, I get nothing.
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".
The user interface, while being modern and a bit playful is still very clear. The performance is quite good. What I am missing are many many keyboard shortcuts though.
I think its a classic example of building your business around your strength - the searching capability.
It shouldnt come across as a surprise that google wants to build components/lines of business around their core strength - be it news, images, blogs or whatever else.
Though what they do need to watch out for is the acceptance, usability and and value provided by these tools in the long run (~5 years). We have all seen numerous examples of companies that had a killer product, but failed to replicate that success elsewhere.
Like someone else mentioned, their image searching capabilities aren't as desirable currently. I haven't been so impressed with google groups yet (though I've heard that's going to be revamped as well). And then there's news and email in beta... so yes, they do have a lot on their plate, and given the poor run of tech industry at the stock market, all eyes will be on them!
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Has anyone downloaded and installed Picasa? As part of the install I get a ZoneAlarm alert saying sp7zFh5.exe is trying to use Picasa to access the internet.
I think it is questionable coding practice to have obscurely named subprocesses running around wanting to get to the net.
(This sig intentionally left blank)
With this new version has google removed the adware and spyware that Picasa use to be known for?
They also use to be a big spammer mainly doing it on usenet, go ridance to that part of them.
"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.
Google became a great company by sticking to its business plan; back linked search rankings with a simple interface.
Then came GIS, which still focuses on the main business, then came the toolbar which starts encroaching on the PC/ browser, then came IRC search... can you see where I'm heading
Which other company can we think of who add more and more functionality to an existing product... as long as this doesnt effect Googles core business, no problem, but this is very rarely the case.
Will we even recognise Google in 5 years time (or less)
Shouldn't call someone lame and lazy for overlooking something if you spell Picasa "Picaso".
From the screenshots and description it sort of looks like iPhoto for Winodws, no?
Okay, so I love Google like the rest of you. They are privately held, seem to actually have a sense of ethics, and tend to do things 'the right way'.
That said, Google is starting to get big. Really big.
As in big enough to throw it's weight around big. I'm not opposed to this, in fact I'd be first in line (or rather as close to the front as I could get) for a Google IPO, but at what point does the whole competition getting squashed thing become a concern?
I'll say it again, I love Google.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Can you post the pix of your secretary? Thanks.
Microsoft has plenty of ressources and offerings that Google isn't giving. For example MS can leverage their browser, they can package any picture software they want into their next OS or Service Pack, they have an IM which tells users when they receive an email from someone.
:
What Google needs to do is extend what it is offering and blow MS out of the water. If more companies join then MS will have to start playing fair or die.
Google, please
1. package Firefox 1.0 with added features as the GoogleFox browser
2. make Picasa run on Linux and Mac
3. offer an IM ala Jabber that allows us to get email notification like MSN Messenger does.
4. extend your Gmail offering to other people than the limited bunch currently seen
Then and only then will Google's offerings be competing with MS. All of this can be done very cheaply and unless Google get's moving MS will crush them with Marketing power and their market power.
Am I the only one who uses Google as a quick spellchecker?
--- Ban humanity.
Exactly!
What I was getting at in my original post was that everyone seems to think that as soon as Google touches something, it's immediately made amazing. Not true! They ruined Deja News for a _loooong time_ (Have you seen their latest beta for groups? Still needs work).
In addition, we, as users, need to keep asking for new features and creating a _DEMAND_ for good products. I send in bugfixes & feature requests several times per week on Gmail. I think that Gmail is far and away _the best_ webmail product out there, but I still get irritated and fire off suggestions about portions of it which don't make sense (what's the point of being able to create a labeling filter that only applies one label? The whole point of labels is to be able to apply several!!!).
So to sum it up, I'm interested, but just not immediately a Picassa zelot just because Google grabbed it...
~i = an imaginary being~
Checking out the Picasa site looks like it only supports MS-Windows. No Linux or MacOS X support. Oh well.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
No. They don't guarantee that your e-mail will be deleted from all their caches and backups the instant you delete it, but they do guarantee that it will get wipped as those things are updated.
The same thing is true of pretty much any webmail service, though.
(No.) Here are the minimum system requirements for Picasa: Personal computer with 300MHz Pentium® processor and MMX® technology. 64 MB RAM (128MB recommended). 50 MB available hard disk space. 800 x 600 pixels, 16 bit color monitor. Microsoft® Windows 98, Microsoft® Windows Me, Microsoft® Windows 2000, or Microsoft® Windows XP. Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.01 (6.0 recommended). If at any time you get an "unable to authenticate" error, you should upgrade to IE 6.0. Microsoft® DirectX 7.0 or higher (8.1 ships with XP, 9.0b recommended). Optional: 56K Internet connection speed (for access to any online services and picture sharing via Hello). Works with JPEG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PSD, AVI, MPG, ASF, and WMV files No, it doesn't run on Linux, nor on Macs, nor my old 486sx running windows 3.1 that I still keep half my photos on (early digital camera adopter).
One of Google's primary strengths is its software, no doubt they're trying to capitalize on that. Do I see Google becoming the Apple within Microsoft? Isn't their other product a search application that you download and run within windows, effectively competing with Microsoft's explorer? Now this program, which reminds me of iPhoto (download from the camera easily, print, organize, etc). This is a competitor to Windows XP's built-in photo management.
Google is competing with Microsoft, and using their own operating system against them!
Don't forget your tin foil cap. They already use Google search technology on gmail. But it's limited to your access rights to your email. Nobody else can search your email.
00101010
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.
I just tried it and couldn't find any spyware or ads. I ran AdAware and Spybot after installing and they didn't have any complaints. Didn't find any references to Picasa being spyware on Google Groups either.
Overall I like it. It's very similar to Adobe Album, except the interface is more minimalistic and cleaner. Compared to Album 2.0 Picasa is a real speed daemon on my older Athlon 800Mhz, 512MB RAM, machine. Album chugs in both the thumbnail view and viewing a single picture full-screen is atrociously slow, easily the slowest image viewing program I've seen in years. I mean you can see the damn thing loading the pictures progressively as if it was downloading the pictures. Adobe should buy the ACDSee viewing engine or something. Picasa is pretty slow at importing stuff but after that it's real speedy.
One thing I like is that you don't have to use the import feature in Picasa as you do in Adobe Album. You simply mark folders to be watched for changes and the program figures out new additions for itself. Album never does this for me, I have to manually run import every damn time I've imported new images with Photoshop or some other application.
What I don't really like is that Picasa uses your real folders on your HD for categorizing images, and it likes to place picasa.ini files all over the place. It's ok, but the Album way of attaching metadata, very rapidly attaching labels, and allowing a picture to be in multiple categories is in my opinion superior as you can perform very neat queries on the data. On the other hand, most users probably never use either categorizing feature and just dump everything in one place. Heck, I do too, I have about 6GB of uncategorized pictures at the moment and I'm not about to sort them anytime soon. In that sort of usage Picasa is probably better since the thumbnail view is much more responsive.
It's got some newbie friendly features like mailing (and automatically resizing the pictures to some predetermined max resolution, no more 10MB attachments from Mom) pictures that my parents might use. Unlike Adobe Album Picasa works perfectly with Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird. For some reason the slideshow feature looks like total ass. I'm guessing the interface is done in some fixed resolution and it's scaling it up (poorly) to my 1600x1200 resolution.
Overall I like it. The download is small and it doesn't try to hijack your system in any way. Unlike other software it didn't even want to associate itself with every picture extension known to man.
It's like deja vu all over again.
If you consider that picture to be private, then what are you doing sharing it with others ?
Especially on the internet.
Not to mention through a third party product that doesn't come with some reasonable expectation of privacy such as e-mail (in which case you would still have to trust that the recipient doesn't forward the information to others).
I think rather than getting 'scared' of Google, perhaps getting scared of your own actions would be the proper recourse. If you realize that you made some pretty stupid posts in the past, then in the future you may think twice before posting, and post anonymously if in doubt.
In the end, that information is out there. Google is just making it easier to find.
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
I tried Picasa out, and was underwhelmed by it's functionality.
I wound up buying iMatch for categorizing/organizing my photos. It's an awesome tool. If you're a windows user on Slashdot, and want to organize your photos, it's probably the software for you.
I literally tried dozens of programs over the span of a week or so, and found fault with each one - until I found iMatch. I was so impressed with it's abilities, I bought it less than a day into my 30 day trial.
I don't know how much of a monopoly Google may become, but I worry about what will happen after the IPO.
Remember Netscape? When that company started up, it's employees described it as a cool place to work, at the forefront of Browser development, fighting goliath (and winning). It didn't take long for it to become corporatized, lose it's luster, and get bought/sold out to AOL, where it became an aging, neglected, and evetually abandoned stepchild, with real development from Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird/Camino.
Regardless of how useful Google becomes or remains in the future, with Google aquiring other companies and steaming towards an IPO, I wonder if it will lose the responsiveness, humor (www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html) and uniqueness (www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/) that typcally comes from a privately held controlled by a small number of individual entrepneurs or a family.
In short, I think people feel a kind of affinity/warmth towards Google which may evaporate if it becomes too "corporate." Maybe this is inevitable, but hopefully not.
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uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
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-Adam
Sign 1 of the comming apocalypse ;)
Where is the improvement to Google's blogging tool? From what I can see (I haven't grabbed it yet) Picasa looks very similar to Apple's iPhoto or any other photo management software.
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. Otherwise, I don't see what this announcement has to do with blogging tools.
---- scrm
If you use Gmail, you'll see that every e-mail isn't shown as an e-mail, they're shown as conversations. So, if you're trying to click the checkbox next to a conversation then try to forward it, does that mean you want to forward the entire conversation, just the last sent e-mail, or one of the e-mails in between? It's ambiguous.
It makes more sense to open a conversation displaying each e-mail separately, then allow you to forward individual e-mails.
Maybe later, they will add functionality to not view your list as conversations and give checkbox forwardability. But, then again, maybe they'll just give us POP3 access.
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.
Man, I really hate to break this to you, but.... thousands of software titles won't work on your Mac (or mine for that matter).
Check their features status page for details on what they've been implementing since their initial release, and what they plan on implementing. It's very encouraging!
I was one of the original developers of Picasa (search, web export and other features). I've got to say, the former Kai Krause developers who work there really know their pixels. Even in the 1.0 incarnation you'll see a lot of attention to subtle details of animation, alpha blending and UI that is usually missing from commercial apps. Every last coder there has written notrivial Mac and Linux software, so it's up to Google to pull the strategic trigger for those ports, if any.
I'm pretty certain that those guys will be making iPhoto users jealous before long.
I started to get all excited about Adobe Album over the image-tagging and querying and stuff ("show me pictures with both me and my wife in the last month"), but then I realized there would be no way for me to get that information back out of the program again if I ever wanted to change to another picture manager -- it seems it's stuck in some proprietary internal DB. (Or am I wrong about that?) So I've held of, unsure about which way to go next.
Now, I got all excited because Google is putting out their own picture manager -- great, the search gurus will get it right! But...you're saying there's no image tagging at all? Arg. I hope they add it sometime soon. (And maintain it in some plain text file.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Would it be possible/desirable/sensible to make/sell a Linux based thin client that used Google services for data storage? Wonder if Google would ever offer a branded thin client?
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
Both are freeware (Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition). But you can tell Adobe has spent a lot more time on usability testing. Picasa won't let me sort newest to oldest, just oldest to newest. Also I noticed a confirmation dialog in Picasa -- something you won't see in Adobe.
I'm getting annoyed using Picasa -- I'm going to stick with Adobe until Google puts their usability gurus on the case.