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."

Monopoly

[yuting (222615)]

Seems like Google is expanding to more areas of our internet lives... Would this be another Microsoft coming?

Re:Monopoly

[Fenresulven (516459)]

I think it's an attempt to survive the built in search options in Longhorn. So it would be more along the lines of surviving Microsoft than trying to become Microsoft.

Re:Monopoly

[InodoroPereyra (514794)]

Then, why do they buy a company that produces windows only software [picasa.com] ? Shouldn't they go for multiplatform / opensource software ? Isn't this Sun's and IBM's and Novell's strategy ?

Re:Monopoly

[override11 (516715)]

Windows only is not a crime. Developing for 90% of the world's PC's only makes sense.

Re:Monopoly

[ImTwoSlick (723185)]

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 ?

Who says they won't make it crossplatform? They can do anything they want with it now.

Re:Monopoly

[arieswind (789699)]

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.

Re:Monopoly

[isopossu (681431)]

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.

Re:Monopoly

[arieswind (789699)]

Gmail is also still in beta, you know, dont come to that conclusion that fast

Re:Monopoly

[Ford Prefect (8777)]

... Except Gmail isn't finished yet.

Re:Monopoly

[Rosco P. Coltrane (209368)]

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.

Re:Monopoly

[vk2 (753291)]

Exactly - I weighed my options of paying the 19.99$ per account for the archive and 2gb features but when I came across fetchyahoo [sourceforge.net] I was very much impressed about the features and ease with which you can download mails from yahoo.

Didn't mean to steal $$ from yahoo but 19$ is too steep per account. However I do pay them for the personal email addresses - So I guess I am justified.

Re:Monopoly

[generic-man (33649)]

The term "beta" has lost all useful meaning. Should we withhold judgment on ICQ [icq.com] because it's been in "beta" since 1994? Should we avoid trusting Google News [google.com] 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."

Re:Monopoly

[nwbvt (768631)]

"If you think about it, the cost of moving is 0."

Not really. People get used to the web services and have trouble leaving them. Same with applications. Its not exactly that hard to switch from IE to Firefox and doesn't cost a dime, yet MS still has 90-something% of the market there.

Does it run on Linux?

[doodlelogic (773522)]

(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.

Awesome!

[nubbie (454788)]

Yet a faster way to find pr0n... thanks google!

Well...I'm still waiting

[incognitox (123292)]

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...

Re:Well...I'm still waiting

[sseremeth (716379)]

Get imgseek [sourceforge.net].

Re:Well...I'm still waiting

[garcia (6573)]

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.

Re:Well...I'm still waiting

[dj245 (732906)]

I'm not overly impressed with Google's web picture search

Depends on what you use it for. Google picture search was a godsend at college when I needed to find pictures of famous paintings so I could write reports about them. Even many obscure paintings (Try Castine Harbour by Lane [google.com]) are found multiple times with google image search. Politicians, famous people, they're all there.

It does need work (more options, better narrowing-down tools) but its a good tool.

Why?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Can anybody tell me why on this page [google.co.uk] I get the link to Picassa, but on this [google.com] one, I get nothing.

Q: When will they start being evil?

[soloport (312487)]

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".

I am impressed

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Well..

[manavendra (688020)]

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!

sp7zFh5.exe

[cosmicpossum (554246)]

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.

Re:sp7zFh5.exe

[sseremeth (716379)]

It's only checking for a new rev.. You can turn it off in the preferences.

Have the improved the Picasa software?

[will_die (586523)]

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.

My Google Picasa review

[Sunspire (784352)]

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.

AskJeeves?

[peterdaly (123554)]

"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

I'm Concerned

[youngerpants (255314)]

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)

Look at me! I'm a Troll!

[numbski (515011)]

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.

this is nothing. I want to see more

[xutopia (469129)]

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.

Google

[HarveyBirdman (627248)]

Am I the only one who uses Google as a quick spellchecker?

Re:Google

[tehcyder (746570)]

yse

Re:Google

[HarveyBirdman (627248)]

yse

Whta?

Only MS-Windows support, move along

[Midnight Thunder (17205)]

Checking out the Picasa site looks like it only supports MS-Windows. No Linux or MacOS X support. Oh well.

Software Giant in the making?

[blackmonday (607916)]

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!

Web APIs

[manmanic (662850)]

Google's usefulness is also being expanded by third party developers using their APIs [google.com] to develop kitschy hits such as Google Fight [googlefight.com] and Googlism [googlism.com]. But there are useful apps too... A recent release is Copyscape [copyscape.com] which uses Google to find people who have plagiarized your web content. It's from the same guys as Google Alert [googlealert.com] 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.

The Yahooization of Google

[Cavio (217880)]

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.

Picasa Schmicasa

[N0decam (630188)]

I tried Picasa out, and was underwhelmed by it's functionality.

I wound up buying iMatch [photools.com] 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.

Just in case google.com gets slashdotted...

[stienman (51024)]

Just in case it gets slashdotted, here's the homepage:
---------------

Google

Web Images Groups News Froogle more »

Advanced Search
Preferences
Language Tools

Have a digital camera? Try Google's Picasa software. Free Download.

Advertising Programs - Business Solutions - About Google

©2004 Google - Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages

---------------
-Adam

Improved blogging tools?

[scrm (185355)]

Where is the improvement to Google's blogging tool [blogger.com]? From what I can see (I haven't grabbed it yet) Picasa looks very similar to Apple's iPhoto [apple.com] 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.

Re:Improved blogging tools?

[Jon_Aquino (672820)]

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.

Re:Funny thing..

[Vitus Wagner (5911)]

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:

1. 
   
2. Google services just works and are not famous for their bugs and instability
   
3. Google doesn't require you to upgrade your PC with each new release of their flagship product
   
4. Google doesn't force PC manufacters to buidle their product with your hardware using unfair clauses in contracts
   
5. Google customers do not send you documents in cryptic format which only Google products can read.
   
6. Google is not designed to enable virus propagation.
   

There was other point - you don't trust your data to Google. But since introduction of GMail this is no more true

One more thing...

[Civil_Disobedient (261825)]

6. Google is free.

Re:Funny thing..

[Apocalypse111 (597674)]

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.

Re:Funny thing..

[Senjutsu (614542)]

My God, do you mean to say that people apply different standards for behavior to convicted monopolists than they do to, say, law-abiding corporations?!

How strange.

Re:Funny thing..

[manavendra (688020)]

Perhaps also because:

1. google is relatively new, and is still expanding.
2. There isn't any new upcoming companies that google has tried to smother (or at least hasn't been know to)
3. Because google still isn't so big as to be deemed a giant monothlith. I think its too early right now for google to have any antagonists. I think for any company to be regarded "evil", it first has to permeate enough businesses/industry segments, and attain that critical mass that overpowers people.
4. And finally, I th

Re:Nice Editorial Work, Michael....

[na2rboy (759019)]

Shouldn't call someone lame and lazy for overlooking something if you spell Picasa "Picaso".

Re:So let's see...

[xigxag (167441)]

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 [google.com] 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 [slashdot.org]!

Re:So let's see...

[Senjutsu (614542)]

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.