1. This was announced over 3 years ago [0]
2. Photos/Videos uploaded to Picasa were transferred to Google Photos automatically (comments/tags/captions will be lost though) [1]
3. Picasa was originally built in 2002! (bought by Google in 2004) -- Perhaps Picasa had a time and place?
Uhh.. isn't that exactly what Google Photos is?
If someone buys a Fire Phone and it gets discontinued - well, products getting discontinued is part of life and it doesn't (usually) affect the usage of the one you have.
If Google builds a web service, then that service has the chance to grow to 50m / 100m users before deciding that it is not worth supporting. Law of large numbers says of those 50/100m a non-trivial proportion will invest substantial time in it and get pissed off when they have to make alternative plans.
If Amazon killed Prime Video or Audible, I bet you’d see a pretty huge outcry.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Also because as humans, we're generally more inclined to dogpile onto the Goliath and root for the David. Underdogs almost always get treated more leniently.
AWS would beg to differ.
However, Amazon has been very good at not getting rid of AWS services so it's reputation is that it's at scale services are going to stay safe.
When a shop stops selling a product, you can still keep using the product you have. They don't take it away from you.
Maybe it's because we know Google is profiting off of our private information, and we don't make a stink about that because they're giving us free stuff. But why shouldn't we be upset when they stop giving us the free stuff we like? They're still profiting off of our private information aren't they?
Amazon just isn't in the same boat.
The fact that not only the idea but also the implementation and the hype and the marketing were all available completely for free and no one ever turned it into a real product tells me that it wasn't a real product.
Google completely botched the roll-out. Wave is essentially useless without others to use it with (no value above Google Docs to use it solo, or standard email/IM to chat with others). I had 10 invites, I sent most of them out. Only two people of the 7 or 8 I invited received their invites. It was completely useless to me because one of the two was someone who just wanted an invite (but I didn't interact with much), and the other was an fellow tabletop gamer and the rest of our group couldn't get in.
When Google finally opened it (looked up dates, I remembered it was short but didn't recall it being this short) to the general public it was May 2010. They announced that they were going to stop developing it (switch to sustainment with plans to shut it down) in August 2010. They gave the service 3 months, and said it didn't have sufficient interest.
No shit, it was three-damned-months!
As best I can tell, someone at Google had intended to shut it down from the start. The fact that their attempt to launch it failed doesn't mean that the system (or its concept) had no potential. But killing it did kill the potential, because you needed that critical mass to gain any value from it.
It had federation which would've been useful, but with no public instance there was little reason for a small group to run their own instance. There was no one to talk to.
I would not at all be surprised if something Wave-ish became a huge deal someday, not would I be surprised if a dozen companies tried it and failed before someone makes it work.
As with any Picasa related subject: Does anyone have a viable alternative desktop software that allows tagging of photos, some mild editing and allowing photos to be kept in folders that are the albums.
When they announced that the desktop software was going away, I immediately downloaded the final version and archived it away. More than likely I will use it until Windows no longer supports it... unless someone "makes a better Picasa".
This is all so depressing. Picasa desktop was great. They killed it. Picasa Web albums were great. They killed it.
Why are they making everything worse?
The market is splitting more and more into consumers who take too many photos to organize it themselves and pros who need robust workflow management solutions.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Picasa, and was very sad when they stopped supporting.
I particularly miss some features, such as creating a time-lapse of all photos of a certain person with the face aligned, which was awesome to show how friends and kids change.
and since my new desktop is linux I've been looking for alternatives. "DarkTable" seems promising but I haven't really got the hand of the UI.
Desktop in 2019? good luck. Adobe or Apple.
"Despite illusions in 2008–2009 that it was a fair player, Google is now trashing free culture by making all the Picasa Web images in Creative Commons vanish from the web.
In fact, users and albums are often forced to "migrate" to Google Plus, without telling them that any Creative Commons marking will be irreversibly destroyed in the process. There's no way to mark Creative Commons images on Google Plus. There's also no way to search or browse Picasa Web by license, apparently (the feature used to exist in 2009)."
I quite like go and Kubernetes.
When it's in their own self-interest I'm not sure whether they're being friendly or not. Can't really tell.
Also go feels a bit tightly controlled to me and like it's not carrying on the traditions of open source scripting languages (same with Swift). Fortunately, Rust and Elixir are shaping up to be good continuations of the culture of Perl/Python/Ruby/etc.
Does it have to be mutually exclusive. Sure, Google is hoping you're going to go GKE for your Kubernetes/Container needs. But you're completely free to use another cloud, or roll your own.
For all cloud native backend stuff I really love Go (and Rust for that matter).
Maybe self-hosting needs to be made easier for the average person? The web has so much bandwidth now that there's no reason outside of potential security issues that people can't be posting more of their own stuff(like a web).
For instance, I want to be able to host my own files without having to make some sort of deal with my ISP. Although I've never had a problem serving requests directly from my computer, it's usually against the rules of ISPs. With a regular internet connection, I should be able to more easily store files on my own hardware and be able to share them with people as easily as I could with Instagram. Maybe there could even be an always-on hardware device that integrates in an open way with third parties that can serve those files, but ultimately those files live on that hardware and can be designated their own domains for URL resolution. Peer-to-peer and Cloudflare support could come with it out-of-the-box to mitigate load issues.
Meh, maybe nobody wants anything like that. I still like the idea.
The solution i have found so far is GitHub Pages. It seems the website, though static, can be arbitrarily deep and large.
It really is a one-liner to spin up a new service on your server nowadays.
Technology that aims to serve that audience should be reasonably usable for that audience.
Be very skeptical of any "differentiating" feature that a Cloud provider tries to sell you.
It means if you organize photos with a program, export them so they sort correctly based on filename, you'll lose your sort as soon as Google Photos gets its ugly hands on them. Google doesn't understand that EXIF times can be wrong.
Of course, it is going to happen eventually.
However, I do have a dozen of photos there with no easy way to export hiqh quality photos in one go that worries me.
I probably have over 30000 photos there so it's a long process to download them all.
These scenarios are actually useful. They train people to use solutions that are open and portable, which will help them respond to unexpected disasters in the future. Use a self-hosted CMS to build, manage and publish your content so you can re-publish your content somewhere else.
If you're able to point to an open and portable self-hosted CMS that has an equivalent feature set to Picasa (and not a minor subset thereof), you'll be sure to gain a lot of praise from myself, and many others here too I'm sure.
