Google Readying Picasa Online?
Philipp spotted a very, very interesting link on Picasa.com, that read “New! Picasa Web Albums”. While we can speculate all we want about what this might refer to, Mahlon seems to have already figured it out. He noticed that the accidental Powerpoint notes from earlier this year included this sentence:
Picasa – provide better organization for our digital lives and with the release of online photo management, organize/store more of our important/cherished data with Google.
Yeah, looks like Picasa is readying some sort of online version, possibly a Flickr competitor. Further supporting all of this is the fact that Google registered picasawebalbums.com on May 17, just a few weeks ago (spotted by iZeitgeist in the Blogoscoped forums).
This could turn out very interesting. Google has done a thing or two lately to remind us that Picasa still exists (including the Linux release), and it would be smart of them to move into this space. I’m just hoping they have the brains to realize that users want all of Google’s products to share a photo service, and not have different storage sites in Blogger, Orkut, and other places.
Maybe Google could reuse Hello.com for the photo site? It would be a great use of an excellent domain name, one that they already own.
