Less Than a Month To Go Before Google Breaks Hundreds of Thousands of Links All Over the Internet (greenspun.com)

Philip Greenspun:Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it automatically gets pushed to the online version of the album). When they were pushing their Facebook competitor, Google+, they set it up so that Picasa created Google+ albums. They wasted a huge amount of humanity's time and effort by shutting down Picasa.

Now they're going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.

Comments

Dependance on vendor service bites users in ass

[schklerg]

Shocked I tell you! Because Google has never shut down a service with little regard to users. And in fact, no other company ever has either!!! And no trendy online startup has ever gone out of business either, with the end users being the only ones who get screwed. If you depend on some proprietary or online (or both) service, you're going to end up screwed eventually. Plan accordingly.

Re:Dependance on vendor service bites users in ass

[Solandri]

The crazy stupid thing is that Picasa was by far the best app I've seen for indexing photos locally. You'd install it and it would search your entire hard drive for all photos, then organize them all so you could flip through them in the app. No having to dig through hundreds or thousands of folders. Other apps required you to conform to the way they worked. Picasa conformed to the way you wanted to work (or not work - you could just dump the latest photos from the camera's memory card to some random folder, and Picasa would dutifully find and index them). And it was so simple to use. I'd just install it on a friend's computer, let it index enough photos so I could show them the basics of it, tell them to give it a few hours to finish indexing, then leave. I never got a "how do you..." call from them about it - they all figured out how to use it on their own. The ability to synchronize Picasa on your desktop with the cloud via picasa.google.com was just gravy.

But Google wants to force everyone onto the cloud, so they killed it. Picasa's stellar local desktop capabilities became a drawback to Google. Google Photos is fairly simple, but nowhere near as flexible nor quick. And Google's own storage policies force you to downgrade photos to 2048x2048 resolution unless you want to pay for more than 15 GB of storage (I have over 6 TB of family and travel photos).

I just hope the Picasa installer still works after they kill off support for it. And that it doesn't do something stupid like check for picasa.google.com and suicide if it can't find it.

Lessons learned?

[SuperKendall]

I would hope people learn a few lessons from this and are not keeping any documents that need to survive long-term in Google Docs...

I have to say, there's no wasted time on my part since I saw the service probably wouldn't get much traction even from launch, and never used it.

There is one thing I find amusing about his post though - he states :

"Example: my review of an Antarctica cruise on the Ocean Diamond. It was so easy to publish the photos via Picasa"

Well that's the classic computer problem right there, you should have known it was wrong when it was "so easy". Anything easy is almost always not permanent, anyone who has been using computers as long as he (or I) have should know better about how long "Easy" lasts.

Re:click bait

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it me or is this news quite sensationalized ? I mean what its about is google shutting down a service not intentionally breaking peoples links

Google is intentionally shutting down Google+. It's not an accident. As a result, they are deliberately breaking a lot of things.

How many times do you have to get fucked by Google before you learn a lesson? If you continue to use *anything* after it is has been bought by Google (Picasa, for example), then you get what you deserve.

If you use *any* Google product, you get what you deserve when it is shut down (and any product *will* be shut down if it doesn't produce the required number of Shekels).