Sunday, March 11, 2007

Product Integration,Version Google :Now its Picasa weds Blogger.

Say hello to the new world of product integration. The concept has been the secret of the rise of mammoths, one whom the new one has taken on. No prizes for guessing who the giants are. Now, into the subject matter.

We’ve seen Microsoft use this strategy for about 15 odd years now and has been very very successful(extra stress on very ) .The integration of Internet Explorer into Windows Explorer ,use of proprietary DLLs into the very famous Visual Studio programming languages and later support to export these into 3rd party compilers was received very well indeed. And, what Microsoft showed was possible in offline products is now being done by its competitor against the creator itself (ala Frankenstein, alas IPRs aren’t to be taken lightly, never mind the bad humor and the point I was trying to make and the fact that this has become an unconventionally long sentence).

The latest in the offering by Google is the export of all the pictures you post in your blog to Picasa .

The offer is that it would provide 1 GB of space that you can use to archive all your pictures by date, tag them and share them too(after all, this has been the mantra of the new web ,the much hyped Web 2.0 –social presence ). And you, in return make them a good competitor to Yahoo Flickr. Of course, they didn’t say that, but what do you think the new features (ala Google style) link in Picasa which refers to the new (aaargh) ‘Search Picasa community photos’ would be for.


And now into the details. Each of your blog has a separate album and the good news (hehe, my hard disk needs some freeing up, note this and you will know my next step).

The little problem for now is that only photos uploaded since December will be archived, for now although, since Google says it is making efforts to get the older ones up as well. Google says the problem is ‘there are a lot of them’ .

The features: You can order prints of them, and mail them. These albums are marked ‘unlisted’ though you can change it later to make them ‘public’. These albums are marked nicely with a ‘B’ (Blogger Logo) and stand out special ;) .


Oh, I forgot to tell you the best part. You can even embed the albums somewhere else in the web. For those who have a real good photo collection, all I would say is “Time to show off, folks”.