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Google To Rebrand Blogger & Picasa For Google+ Integration
dkd903 writes "Google plans to rebrand its photo-sharing platform Picasa and the blogging platform Blogger and will re-introduce them as Google Photos and Google Blogs. All this forms part of a massive feature addition to Google's new social network, Google+."
I really hate the cloud.
I thought I'd have a look, and went to the page where it asked me to log in with my google account. I did so, only to *then* be told that you can't join up!
I understand they're in beta (hey, what google product isn't in perpetual beta?!), but the point of a social network is to attract and maintain users. Right now, all the buzz going around quickly dissipates from people when they reach the doors of the country club, only to be turned away.
A friend of mine received an invite for it, but she cannot make an account since "they are full up right now".
Google lacking server power and/or bandwidth? Say it ain't so! I suspect they want to play on the "exclusivity" thing to make people want to join up - it worked for gmail (but I suspect a lot of that success was because it was a genuinely better free email service than Hotmail and Yahoo), but did not work so well for Orkut (remember that?).
I completely agree, until they can at least save the feature set. I use the facial recognition to help sort hundreds of photos at a time. I don't necessarily want to "share" recognition, but I still want it to organize my own photos.
I8-D
It more sounds like they are just renaming products they own that are fairly successful and merging them for basic functionality that every social networking site has.
Google just sounds so sweet to my ears, much better than some random names that I don't know are associated with my favorite company of all time.
That's it. I'm completely fed up with hearing about this stupid new whizz-bang service, dammit! Please stop posting and blogging and writing articles about this crap.
until you send me an invite
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I've always thought that fragmentation of their products (possibly due to the large number of products having been purchased from their creators) is part of what has halted or slowed their popularity. While it's still too early to tell if Google+ is going to be the force they hope it'll be, I can only imagine that bringing all of their socially geared products under one roof will simply add to the surge of people joining up.
Think about all of the people who don't know about Picasa or blogger, now they see this new shiny Google+ with these things integrated? If it were me, I'd probably just be impressed with how well rounded the network is so early (assuming they do it in a while that's impressive). Google has a great brand to geeks and non-geeks alike and I, for one, hope they do well with this.
I should have been a girl, with the way I can dance... my moves are amazing!
I wasn't aware that facebook had a blog feature.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Google has a long track record of products that never took off. Google+ may be no exception. They probably shouldn't overentangle things into it in an attempt to "force" it into popularity.
I'm pretty sure every company has a wall of shame; must I bring up Bob, the Newton, or Clippy? This feels more like a consolidation than the launch of a new product. I'm concerned about how this will affect Google's CLI, I have an extensive number of scripts for backing up my photos to Picasa on-the-fly.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
It's called "Notes", It allows for much longer posts than normal wall status updates.
I wasn't aware that facebook had a blog feature.
They call it a "status message."
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
While not a real blogging feature, they do have the Notes feature that can be used for more in depth updates.
I would liken it more to the "Notes" feature which is extremely blog like.
With confusing names like Picasa and Blogger, I was at a loss to understand what those products were and who owned them. Thank goodness Google has cleared up this mystery. Now I can go back to sorting my pocket lint by color and size.
Bearded Dragon
Then why did you bother putting forth the effort to even comment? Attention whoring?
Blogger and Picasa are good names: concise, searchable, and trademarkable.
But I guess that Google's marketing department wants headlines to reverberate their name in the tech and business media.
I will adjust, but I still think that the decision sucks.
Do FB Notes appear on people's news feed if they aren't tagged in it? I thought that Notes were only written for oneself and whoever was tagged, and other users couldn't see them unless they purposely went looking for them. (Yes, I know that an outside RSS feed can be linked to Notes, but I thougth this was a half-assed attempt at making them useful.)
I am sure there will be Facebook fans for sometime to come. I am sure that G+ won't take out Facebook. Facebook could implement the same controls that G+ has. G+ doesn't have Farmville, I'm sure that will hurt it by some people's standards. I don't worry about the integration with the rest of Google. It just tells me that Google is really very confident in their G+ product. The integration just makes sense. It is pretty obvious where they will integrate it further (e.g. Google Reader). G+ is a huge play for Google. It just feels better than anything they've done in the space so far.
Start your own circle
With Google+ you can actually save all of your photos to your hard disk. It downloads them as a zip. :)
"Do FB Notes appear on people's news feed if they aren't tagged in it?"
Yes.
Depends on how that integration works out. As long as all the pieces remain modular, there might be no down side to better integrating various products. For example, when I create a gmail account I also have access to docs and calendars. I can safely ignore either if I never want to use those features even if they're one click away. Never touching a Calendar will not expose anything from gmail.
Note that this is different from when Google released Buzz which exposed information from other services (namely gmail). Hopefully they've learned from that mistake.
I know people don't like this movie, and I agree the story has nothing to with the title or Microsoft, but this Google+ basically Synapse. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jN8LC1aDpk.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I completely agree, until they can at least save the feature set. I use the facial recognition to help sort hundreds of photos at a time. I don't necessarily want to "share" recognition, but I still want it to organize my own photos.
Then you should just use iPhoto instead of uploading to a web site.
I think that the majority of tech savvy users won't see the point in integrating Picasa and Blogger into the Google+ platform because we're already use to using these services and know how to navigate around them. But for people like my grandmother who think Google is just the search page and GMail, this could help to bring them to a place where they feel more comfortable using other Google services. If Blogger and Picasa look more like something that my grandmother uses every day, she's going to be more likely to explore the service to see what it can do. I think Google is on the right track here. Having a common user interface among all of their products and services can only help to make it easier for users to start using new services that they never tried in the past.
That's more comparable to a microblogging feature than a blog.
If it's from Google, it could grind newborn infants and puppies into a slurry and tech bloggers would shower it with love and geek adoration.
With facebook, you can do that too! https://www.facebook.com/download/
So like the potentially confusing Google Chat, Google Talk and Google Voice, there's now Google Images and Google Photo? Bravo Google! *slow clap*
how is babby formed?
I would like to use iPhoto, but the big feature it's missing for me is auto-discovery of pictures.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
This reminds me of how Microsoft rebranded all their stuff "Windows Internet Explorer," "Windows Live Messenger," and so on. It's astounding how much this company has become like Microsoft. Just as Microsoft is dependent on the Windows platform, Google is dependent on their advertising platform, and they must tie as many people too it as they can.
Google has a long track record of products that never took off. Google+ may be no exception. They probably shouldn't overentangle things into it in an attempt to "force" it into popularity.
I'm pretty sure every company has a wall of shame; must I bring up Bob, the Newton, or Clippy? This feels more like a consolidation than the launch of a new product. I'm concerned about how this will affect Google's CLI, I have an extensive number of scripts for backing up my photos to Picasa on-the-fly.
And then there's Microsoft Access. The original one (serial communications) not the current database application. It used to have a mention on Wikipedia, but now even that is gone. Motto: if you have an application that becomes am utter failure, re-use the name until it becomes attached to a product which is a success. Then its association with failure is buried.
For those whose memories are short, Microsoft Access was a serial communication program which competed with Hayes Smartcom II and suchlike back in the days of DOS. It flopped, partly because people had alternatives, and in part because most of the alternatives were better (but don't look at the prices, really, don't). Here's a 1986 article on modem sharing and how Microsoft Access would probably do it in the future while other did it already.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Forgot the linky bit for that 1986 article.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
email me your gmail address at jacer@mailinator.com
I'll check it tonight and send you a Google+ invite.
This goes for anyone else too.
Is this for real, or are you just trolling to see who will publish their email addresses in a public place? So far, there are only three, perhaps partly because slashdot is mostly frequented by paranoid cynics, or friendless sociopaths.
Alternatively, did bvukich or koalacuhe or stevetop159 actually receive a real google+ invite? Or are you now just waiting for the spamflood to start?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
They should use something more evolutionary and more suitable for giant company, like: Google Plus Picasa Photo Service
You forgot, that you can still use Google as a search engine!
In the future you will be able do that with Google google
Call me back when Picasa is a native application. I don't now nor will ever use Wine.
Kriston
I really hate the cloud.
I also hate the cloud, but they have already FUCKED Picasa. It always had a few quirks but it is now so buggy that I don't trust it. After months of correcting face data, after my latest upgrade it just started becoming corrupt every few restarts. The first time I lost probably 40 man hours of work. Fuck Google. Fuck Picasa. Fuck the "Cloud".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Does this mean that Google will be trying to leverage Picassa and Blogger to coerce people into joining their Network in order to use them? That's what I read in the word 'rebranding' and it doesn't sound good.
Yes it's not as convenient. The point is, it's possible. And frankly, it's pretty easy to grab only the images out of something, or only the movies, or whatever. It's not like these filetypes aren't clearly identified by their extensions.
I hope they don't roll up picasa and blogger until *after* they've fixed Google+ integration with GoogleApps hosted domains.
Google have acknowledged that Google+ can't be used with email addresses hosted in GoogleApp domains but there is no word on when or if this will be fixed. Moving other products into Google+ will just reduce the number of google services that I can access, and I'm a paying google customer!
--M
# grep slashdot access.log | grep html | sort | uniq | wc -l 2604
If this gets Picasa some more maintenance, that would be great. I use it and there are some very annoying bugs that Google doesn't seem to have the motivation (read: enough eyeballs) to care about fixing.
for my invite.. snooze. My coworker has friends in Google and he got his, but even he can't invite me to try it out. Any service that people can't use is useless.. tyvm.
Bye!
Hopefully they won't just rebrand their services, but make them work better with each other. I think it is still not possible to attach pictures from Picasa and documents from Google docs when sending mail from gmail. There are other places where Google's services don't talk to each other very well.
He's referring to this which provides native x86 binaries, but is crying over the fact it uses it's own build of Wine on Linux, as if that's something wrong?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.