Google Acquires Picasa, Improves Blogging Tools 369
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."
I am impressed (Score:3, Informative)
Have the improved the Picasa software? (Score:5, Informative)
They also use to be a big spammer mainly doing it on usenet, go ridance to that part of them.
Re:Monopoly (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Monopoly (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well...I'm still waiting (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:sp7zFh5.exe (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Sorta looks like... (Score:2, Informative)
Only MS-Windows support, move along (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:So let's see... (Score:4, Informative)
The same thing is true of pretty much any webmail service, though.
Does it run on Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Monopoly (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Sorta looks like... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So let's see... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
"Beta" is just a way for a company to say "if this breaks, we don't care."
Web APIs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google (Score:2, Informative)
*Yes, yes, only parts of it. I am aware of the other parts. No need to be nostalgic and bring up gopher or be nit-picking and bring up ssh et cetera.
My Google Picasa review (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Picasa Schmicasa (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Improved blogging tools? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Reasons Why You Can't Forward Gmail (Score:3, Informative)
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 [google.com].
they won't be locking in (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
You may have noticed (or you may not have, if you don't use IE) that when ou conduct a search w/o the google toolbar, sometimes the toolbar ad will appear at the bottom of the page, and sometimes it doesn't.
Further, there are actually two toolbar ads (one with folding-at-home, and one without) that are selected at random as well.
I'm not really sure why goold chooses random distribution of its products. But at least they are consistent.
And it does help to keep their web page a little cleaner because I don't need to see all of the ads, all of the time; just some of the ads, some of the time.
Re:Monopoly (Score:3, Informative)
Keep in mind that Gmail is still in the testing stages, and I'm sure the developers are swamped with bug fixes that they need to fix before they begin adding new features. I have already discovered and reported numerous bugs and received messages from gmail support that they have been forwarded to the appropriate developers. They will likely offer a way to download your emails in the future, I can't see what they would stand to lose from adding a feature like that.
Re:Reasons Why You Can't Forward Gmail (Score:3, Informative)
You can't forward or reply by clicking the checkbox--you must first view the message. If it's a message in a conversation, it, and every LATER message in the conversation will be forwarded. If you want to forward only that message, just click on the "More Options" links and clink on Forward.
That's how it functions currently.
Maybe, but it would be a redundent function when you can just open the first message in the conversation to do the same thing. Doean't mean they can't or won't implement it...
See GmailTips.com [gmailtips.com] for more Gmail Tips
Re:Picasa Schmicasa (Score:2, Informative)
As you may have guessed though, I'm PHP-loving, so this may or may not suit you!
Picasa usability not as good as Album (Score:2, Informative)
I'm getting annoyed using Picasa -- I'm going to stick with Adobe until Google puts their usability gurus on the case.
Re:Monopoly (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with that analysis is that it's much too kind to the underdog operating systems.
I'm having a hard tiime finding good numbers, but it seems that Apple's market share has generally been in decline over the years [macobserver.com], with most sources citing a market share or install base fluttering around three or four percent for the past couple of years [homeip.net], with some wildly optimistic speculation that Apple could hit eight percent by 2008 [ecommercetimes.com].
In the most recent report I could find [macnn.com], Apple's market share was put at 3.7%, with recent quarter growth of 9.3% -- but this is in a market where Dell alone has a share of 32.9%, and the market overall grew by 10.9% in the USA and 15.5% globally. That is to say, even though Apple is "growing" relative to their own recent performance, they're still not growing at a rate that keeps up with the industry as a whole, and they're especially slipping behind global figures. Their market share trend is going down, even as their health as an individual company appears to be holding steady or improving.
Meanwhile, figures for Linux are harder to determine, but it seems that the past couple of years suggest that Linux has hovered at a steady 1% [homeip.net], so the picture isn't any stronger on that side -- they're doing at best 1/3 of what Apple is doing.
(And yes, market share figures [ecommercetimes.com] are all voodoo [osviews.com] that is about as reliable as hardware benchmarks (that is to say, hardly reliable at all), but still, the discussion doesn't work if you don't at least take a stab at quantifying things. So please, grant me some leeway here :-)
More to the point, it doesn't seem like Google has ever had a problem with catering to just the dominant platform. Consider the Google Toolbar, which has been available for years as an IE only plugin on Windows -- it has never been available for the Mac version of IE, and it has never been offered for other operating systems (they just meekly suggest putting links to Google in your Netscape bookmark bar, but that hardly counts for much). Admittedly, Mozilla has had third-party Google search plugins for a while now, and when Safari came out it had a built-in Google search box, but these were both provided by third-parties, not Google.
The only client-side software Google has offered in the past has been for Windows and IE, and the Picassa acquisition is just a continuation of this pattern.
I played around with Picassa for a little while last night, and it is a pretty slick application; I can see why they wanted it (the UI is quite clever, and they may want to put some of the people who thought it up to work on their existing web tools & webmail). I'd love to see a version of it for OSX (please, please something better than iPhoto), but I'm not convinced that that Google will bother porting it, based on the questionable market share trends and their past client-side offerings.