Monday, July 24, 2006

Google as Web 1.9?

Google is one of the most popular destinations on the web, only recently unseated as the most popular destination by MySpace. Many of us use their other services such as Gmail, Calendar, Froogle and Blogger. Google's core is about search and advertising. While they continue to experiment on multiple fronts with new services their main thrust is to make search more accurate and relevant. This is creating a situation where Google initially led the way in demonstrating Web 2.0 technologies and have some of their products (Maps) leveraged by other Web 2.0 players. One of the newer services is Picasa Web Album. In test mode at the moment it offers 250Mb of storage to upload and share pictures. This is a Windows oriented service accessible from Google's Picasa application. Mac and Linux users can upload pictures via a web page that offers an interface to upload up to 5 pictures at a time. In comparison with Flickr this looks more like a Web 1.9 application. When a solution is released for the Mac let's hope it allows a seamless interface with iPhoto. I would also like to see private albums - not just hidden albums. Tagging coul be beefed up too. I am surprised that Google hasn't looked at a way to use the tagging of photos in Picasa web albums to help improve the accuracy of image seartches on Google.
Posted by Unknown at 7:39 PM

3 comments:

  1. Dennis D. McDonald10:12 PM

    i'm mostly a windows user, but the lack of a mac version of picasa was a big turn-off back when it was introduced as a local client. iTunes has Mac and Windows versions, why doesn't Picasa?

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  2. Unknown8:30 AM

    Dennis, I am with you on this. I work in a multi-platform environment and it is important to me that applications work across both PC and Mac platforms.

    I can fully understand Google not producing a Mac version of Picasa because Apple has a lock on all recent Macs with iPhoto/iLife.

    However, I am still trying to understand why it has taken so long to provide a Google home on the web for pictures. I believe the right set of tools would help them to improve the accuracy of their image search and provide more opportunities to point eyeballs at Google Ads.

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  3. Unknown12:41 AM

    Dennis, ask and you shall receive!

    Google has announced a plug-in to enable the export of Mac photos to their Picasa Web Albums.

    Flickr probably still rules but Google is moving in the right direction.

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