Picasa Web Albums

Google has released a new Picasa feature on a first-come, first-serve basis: Picasa Web Albums. With Picasa Web Albums, you can have one-click access to upload photos to the web by using Picasa’s new "Web Album" button. The albums offer enough free storage space to post and share about 1000 photos (250 MB), with the option to upgrade to more space. (The rate will be $25/year for 6 more gigs of storage.) Unlike flickr, that 250 MB is a storage space limit, not a bandwidth limit on uploads (flickr’s free account limits you to 20 MB bandwidth limit per month), so flickr wins for me there. On the other hand, a free account at flickr only displays the 200 most recent photos uploaded…although older ones aren’t deleted, they don’t display in your list of photos unless you upgrade to a pay account. Picasa Web Albums’ user interface claims to offer quick scrolling using arrow keys, and will mimic a desktop experience of "flipping" through photos. (That’s a desktop experience? More like a real life experience…) Also, with Picasa Web Albums, you can easily share your photos via email; you can email a link to your photos, albums, or gallery just by clicking the "share" button. Sign up for an invite to Picasa Web Albums today! It sounds like it’s worth checking out.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Flock, the open-source, Firefox-based browser, is back. (See earlier post here). Flock has received a new round of funding, rumored to be around $10 million, and will be releasing a public beta tonight at Flock.com. The genius of Flock is in the features that come built into the browser, including photo integration with Flickr or Photobucket, social bookmarking integration with Del.icio.us or Shadows, a blogging tool, enhanced search and a RSS reader. Those features make Flock a very appealing browser to a blogger like me. Good enough to get me to switch? That will depend on the extensions. As great as the features are, I still like the big list of Firefox extensions that are available today. Would you switch?

Yesterday, a new release of Google Earth, Google Earth 4, became available. This version offers a significant high-resolution imagery update that increases the index of high-resolution imagery by 4 times, making high-resolution imagery available for more than one third of the world’s population. This database will also be soon be accessible in Google Maps. In addition, Google Earth has a more streamlined user interface and new tools that enable the creation and display of 3rd party and user-generated content. More buildings are now textured, which brings a new level of realism to the product. Google Earth is now available not just for Windows and Mac, but now, for the first time, Linux as well. With another Google product, Google SketchUp, users can create textured buildings for visualization in Google Earth and the Google 3D Warehouse. Time to upgrade!

Farecast is the first airfare predication website. With Farecast, you will know when to buy based on when airfares are rising or dropping. Shoppers using Farecast will buy directly with the airlines sites after finding the best time to buy. The beta version only predicts fares out of Boston or Seattle, which doesn’t help me out much. However, when the site goes live, I think it could be very useful. In the meantime, I have 25 beta invites to give out. Any takers?

Is anyone NOT talking about Scoble’s departure from Microsoft? Let’s be different and talk about something else. Oops. Too late. Oh well…in other Microsoft news, how about the fact that you can download Vista via BitTorrent now? Vistatorrent is a new site set up where you can get a clean, legal copy of the Vista ISO. According to the site: "Windows enthusiasts Chris and Jake have downloaded the official beta release and created a torrent…This is not a crack, this is not a hack, this is not software piracy - it’s unofficial mirroring with official validation. You can get a Windows Vista Beta 2 product key for free through Microsoft, as the OS won’t install without one."

If only I had the hardware….

In the next month or two, Digg.com, the popular tech news website, will add coverage of world news, entertainment, politics, and more, according to Kevin Rose, the president of Digg. It should be interesting to see if this will make Digg popular with the non-tech masses. Time will tell, but I am looking forward to the changes.

By the way, I co-hosted a podcast recently. If you want to check it out, click here for the download. Only for the very geeky! The topic: Web 2.0 for the I.T. Pro. The podcast is the SBS Show #20 and it was with Bob Rebholz, Microsoft Group Product Manager. The SBS Show is hosted by Vlad Mazek, who seems to think I’m some sort of expert.

Google has released an extension for the Firefox web browser that is now, quite possibly, one of my favorite extension to date. Google Browser Sync for Firefox continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. The information is encrypted, transmitted and stored on Google’s servers in a format that is nearly impossible to interpret without your PIN. Without your PIN, no one, not even Google, will be able to read your data. (In theory). So remember to use a good PIN — at least 8 characters including both numbers and letters. Make sure it’s hard to guess and to keep it safe.

Yesterday,
Typepad released a new feature — a seamless way to connect your TypePad feed to FeedBurner. If you’re already using FeedBurner, when you connect your feed, all of your readers who subscribe to your TypePad feeds will automatically receive that content from FeedBurner. Since I already use FeedBurner, the process was very easy. I clicked one button "Connect to FeedBurner," entered my login details, selected the feed I had already set up and I was done. If you aren’t already with FeedBurner, signing up for a new account is pretty easy, too, I hear. Once you’re with FeedBurner, you can use the TypePad widgets to add a "Subscribe Now" button or an email subscription box to your blog. TypePad keeps getting better and better, don’t they?

Wikia, the sister site to Wikipedia, just got a new CEO - the former GM & VP of Ebay, Gil Penchina. Wikia has been around since November of 2004, and, unlike Wikipedia, the Wikia communities are all about opinions, not facts. For example, a personal favorite of mine at Wikia is the Lost Wiki, which is all about our favorite ABC show. I’m excited to see what new vision and leadship someone like Penchina can bring to this community of communities. Maybe we’ll be hearing about the latest scandal at Wikia instead of Wikipedia for a change?